What students said on Reddit
Someone on r/uklaw asked which AI tools were helping people study law, and how they used them. The replies were more cautious than the question. This page is LexCases summarising a public Reddit discussion in our own words. It is not Reddit, no username appears here, and the students in the thread do not speak for us.
Built by a law student, with the students who use it.
On this page
This thread is from December 2024, and the tools in it have changed since. The warnings have not, which is why it is still worth reading. The account that asked has since been deleted, but the question and the replies are still up, and we read every one the page showed. A few nested replies were folded away and are not included.
Which AI tools are helping you study law?, on r/uklaw, posted 12 December 2024.
Most of the uses students described were about understanding material they already had, not finding new material.
Several students used Claude or ChatGPT to put a complicated point of law, or a paragraph from a textbook, into simpler words. One also used it to make flashcards, and added straight away: just do not use it for research.
NotebookLM came up more than once, because it answers from the chapters you upload and cites them. One student went as far as saying that means no chance of it making things up. Another put it more carefully: it lowers the chance, and when it does go wrong you can see why.
One student uploads hundreds of pages of slides and PDFs to Gemini and asks for explanations, analogies, flashcards and practice questions, and said their grades went up. They still cross-check its answers, because it sometimes makes things up.
A couple of students had used Perplexity to come up with cases, and liked that it shows where its answer came from.
Many of the recommendations came with a warning attached, and the warnings were specific.
One student asked ChatGPT what to read and it made up papers. Another, updating a law book, said it invents statutes. A third said it will make up whole cases, or quote judges who did not sit on the case.
One commenter tested Claude on an appealed issue they knew well. It gave the first-instance decision rather than the Supreme Court's, until told there was more recent law; then it summarised the right one well. Their verdict: good for explaining, not for doing the research.
One student called it hopeless for anything that needs critical analysis, and said it gets simple multiple-choice questions wrong, though it can suggest cases.
One reply suggested that rather than having AI read and write your notes, you go to the lectures and workshops, where the information will at least be correct.
One student summed up the thread's mood: “There is no reliable publicly available AI tool for legal research.” Use it as a starting point if you like, they said, but look every case up yourself.
We build LexCases, and the worry that runs through this thread, invented cases, is the one it is built around: every case it shows has been through a separate check, and anything that cannot be confirmed is dropped. That check is itself an AI process, so the rule these students gave still applies. Open the source before you cite it.