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Background The TC Beirne School of Law at The University of Queensland is a leading Australian law school with an illustrious history and a focus on the future. A key part of that focus is ensuring students...
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The TC Beirne School of Law at The University of Queensland is a leading Australian law school with an illustrious history and a focus on the future. A key part of that focus is ensuring students are well prepared to enter the legal profession.
The TC Beirne School of Law recognises that technology will continue to change the way legal work is organised and performed. While AI is a powerful new tool, its value depends on the quality of the lawyer using it. That is why they have partnered with LexisNexis® and its AI tool, Protégé™, as part of their broader effort to embed AI skills and literacy in the Bachelor of Laws (Honours) degree.
Artificial intelligence is already reshaping the day-to-day work of legal practice. Research, drafting, summarisation, and the organisation of legal materials are all being affected by the rapid development of new tools. The TC Beirne School of Law views this as both an opportunity and a responsibility. The opportunity is to prepare students for the profession they are entering. The responsibility is to do so in a way that strengthens, rather than weakens, the habits of mind and standards of judgement on which good legal practice depends.
For the TC Beirne School of Law, the implementation of Protégé is not merely to give students access to a new technology. It is to create a structured educational environment in which students can learn how to engage with law-specific AI intelligently, critically, and responsibly. By bringing Protégé into a research-led educational setting where its possibilities, limits, and implications can be examined carefully, UQ law students can experiment with AI while receiving appropriate guidance. Professor Ross Grantham, Director of Teaching and Learning at the TC Beirne School of Law, explains:
"Our partnership with LexisNexis is helping us introduce students to law-specific AI in a way that is educationally serious and professionally grounded. We want our students to be confident using these tools, but even more importantly, we want them to understand how to question them, test them against authority, and recognise when their own legal judgement must prevail. That is the capability an AI-enabled legal profession will demand."
The starting point in adopting AI for the Law School is simple. They believe a high-quality legal education must still teach students how to identify legal problems, structure complex questions, locate and assess authority, test arguments, and exercise ethical and professional judgement. Those capabilities remain central even as the tools of legal work change. Indeed, the emergence of AI makes them more important, not less. A tool may produce a summary quickly, generate an answer that appears plausible, or suggest a path through a complex body of material. But none of this removes the need for a lawyer who can decide whether the answer is sound, the reasoning is adequate, the source base is reliable, and the proposed course of action is legally and ethically defensible. The School’s position on AI reflects exactly that understanding: generative AI and law-specific AI are powerful tools, but they are not substitutes for a rigorous, research-led legal education distinguished by rigour, sophistication, and global reach.
Through a decision to introduce the Protégé tool at the beginning of the student journey, the Law School are able to provide early, structured exposure to law-specific AI tools and build students’ AI literacy from the outset of the degree. This ensures their students are introduced to not only what a tool like Protégé can do, but also to the professional habits that must accompany its use. AI literacy, in this sense, is not a narrow technical competence; it is part of legal method. It concerns how to read, evaluate, check, and use information effectively, as well as how to exercise judgement in an environment where information is abundant, but reliability cannot be assumed.
This early exposure matters to Law School, as Professor Ross Grantham explains:
"Good legal habits are formed over time. Students who develop a strong sense from first year that authority matters, that sources must be checked, that answers must be tested, and that judgement cannot be outsourced, are much better placed to use AI well later in their studies and in practice. Conversely, students who come to think of AI simply as a fast way to produce text risk misunderstanding the nature of legal work. Law is not merely the production of language. It is a disciplined professional practice grounded in authority, reasoning, responsibility, and judgement."
The Law School’s partnership with LexisNexis is intended to help students understand that distinction clearly and early.
The collaboration with LexisNexis fits within a broader curricular strategy for Law School through their incorporation of AI literacy across the whole degree rather than treating it as a single isolated topic. Their students encounter AI in foundational skills training, in legal research, in ethical reflection, and in dedicated teaching about AI and law. In that respect, the use of Protégé is part of their larger educational design, teaching students that AI is not something external to legal education, nor something that sits apart from it. Rather, it raises questions that connect directly to core legal concerns: the quality of reasoning, the trustworthiness of authority, the professional duties of lawyers, the obligations owed to clients and courts, and the proper exercise of independent judgement.
The Law School emphasise that ethics and professional responsibility are especially important here, “where lawyers owe duties to clients, to courts, and to the broader community. Those duties do not disappear because technology is involved. If anything, new technologies sharpen the need for careful professional judgement, because they can make it easier to move too quickly from output to action without sufficient scrutiny. One of the central goals of the work at TC Beirne School of Law is to ensure students understand that AI must complement legal reasoning, not replace it, and that responsibility for the final work remains with the lawyer,” shares Professor Ross Grantham.
This is why law-specific tools matter. In legal education, there is an important difference between generic AI systems and tools designed with legal work in mind. A law-specific tool, like Protégé, creates an opportunity to teach students in a context that is closer to the realities of the profession. It enables a more concrete discussion about legal research, legal authority, drafting, verification, and the practical conditions in which lawyers work. The Law School’s collaboration with LexisNexis enables them to move the discussion from abstraction to application. It allows students to see how AI might be used in actual legal workflows, while still making clear that those workflows must remain anchored in authority, discipline, and human judgment.
For the TC Beirne School of Law, the partnership also reflects a broader view about the future of legal education. It is not enough for law graduates to simply be familiar with AI, nor merely being efficient users of legal technology. Professor Ross Grantham suggests,
"What the profession will increasingly require are graduates who can use such tools thoughtfully and explain their use confidently. They need to be able to justify the steps they have taken, to assess the reliability of what they have received, and to recognise when the answer given by a system is incomplete, misleading, or inadequate. They must also understand that there will be circumstances in which the most important professional act is not to accept the output, but to question it. The School’s formal position puts the matter well: our graduates need to know which questions matter, how to test the answers they receive, and when they must look beyond the output of the tool and rely on their own legal reasoning."
There is also an important institutional dimension to this partnership for the Law School. The School is committed to ensuring that its students are prepared for an AI-enabled profession without losing sight of what makes a legal education distinctive. Professor Ross Grantham explains,
"A UQ legal education is not defined by technological novelty alone. It is defined by rigour, sophistication, and a research-led approach to learning. Our work with LexisNexis is valuable precisely because it can be incorporated into that larger educational mission. It supports, rather than displaces, our commitment to deep doctrinal knowledge, close analysis, ethical seriousness, and intellectual independence."
Ultimately, for the TC Beirne School of Law, this partnership is about preparing students for the profession as it is becoming, while remaining faithful to the enduring purposes of legal education. Their collaboration with LexisNexis and Protégé is practical, future-focused, and grounded in a clear educational philosophy ensuring their graduates not only use AI, but that they use it well: critically, responsibly, and with the confidence that comes from genuine legal understanding. In that sense, the partnership is not only about technology. It is about the kind of lawyers we are educating for the future.
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