Bocconi Brings Artificial Intelligence Into Legal Education
Artificial intelligence is already changing the way law is studied, interpreted and applied in professional practice. For this reason, Bocconi’s School of Law is launching a collaboration program with some of the leading international players in the field, to integrate the use of legal AI into the education of future lawyers.
The agreements with Harvey, a US company, and Legora, a Swedish company, will allow students, faculty and researchers in Law and Global Law to access, from the new academic year, artificial intelligence platforms designed for legal work. The aim is not to add another digital tool to the curriculum, but to train students to use these technologies with competence, critical judgment, attention to sources, awareness of technological limits and respect for professional responsibilities.
Harvey will provide students, faculty and researchers with access to AI agents and tools for contract analysis, compliance, litigation, and other legal work. Legora will bring to the project an agentic operating system for legal work, supporting lawyers in research, review, and drafting across complex matters.
The collaboration with Lexroom, Italian platform, will provide support on initiatives related to Italian law. Lexroom will be involved in legal clinics and in legal drafting labs in Italian, contributing tools for legal research and the drafting of legal texts based on verified sources.
“Artificial intelligence is not a side issue for legal education: it is a structural transformation of the way law will be practiced in the coming years,” says Pietro Sirena, Dean of Bocconi’s School of Law. “Our responsibility is to avoid both naive enthusiasm and defensive rejection. We must teach students to use these tools while knowing how to verify sources, understand risks, assess the quality of outputs and preserve legal method. With this initiative, we want to make Bocconi’s School of Law an advanced laboratory for experimentation and innovation in legal education.”
“Bringing AI into education does not mean teaching students to delegate reasoning to machines,” says Dirk Hovy, Dean for Digital Transformation at Bocconi. “It means exactly the opposite: making them more aware of how these systems work, where they can be useful, where they can fail, and which human skills become even more important. Law is one of the areas where this critical literacy is most urgent, because accuracy, responsibility and verifiability are not technical details: they are part of the profession.”
The initiative will have a public milestone in October, with a forum dedicated to the future of legal education in the age of artificial intelligence. The event will bring together the academic, professional and technology communities around a central question: what skills should a lawyer have in order to be prepared for a profession increasingly enabled by AI?
The forum will address the main open issues: what legal AI tools can and cannot do; how the work of young lawyers is changing; what new expectations are emerging from law firms, legal departments, tax, audit and compliance; how to verify sources and outputs; what professional responsibilities arise from the use of AI; and how to govern confidentiality, quality, risk and legal method. A Legal AI Challenge is also planned, designed to demonstrate the practical use of these tools on a legal case and to discuss their limits, validation, ethical and methodological implications.
“With this initiative,” Sirena concludes, “Bocconi’s School of Law intends to position itself among the most active European institutions experimenting with AI applied to law. The aim is to prepare a new generation of lawyers able to work with advanced tools without losing what remains central to the profession: methodological rigor, interpretive ability, critical judgment, ethical responsibility and an understanding of the economic, social and institutional context in which law operates.”