10 From bytes to brains: A learning alliance
Misha Salehuddin, Undergraduate Student, Law, United Kingdom
As a law student juggling multiple academic, extracurricular, and administrative responsibilities, I’ve used Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT in several contexts to support my workflow. These tools are most useful when I need quick support for structured thinking, time management, and clear communication. Academically, I engage with complex legal materials and am often required to draft essays, case analyses, and legal articles. GenAI serves as a tool in the early stages of these processes to help me brainstorm, stay organised, and communicate to my audience effectively. Outside formal coursework, I also use it when planning schedules that balance my university workload with responsibilities in student societies and external activities. Additionally, I’ve used GenAI in more administrative contexts, such as drafting emails to lecturers or preparing professional correspondence for internships or society leadership roles. In all these situations, GenAI complements my efforts by helping to reduce cognitive load and streamline tasks, allowing me to focus more energy on critical thinking and personal input.
As a law student, I use Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT to support my academic workflow, manage my responsibilities, and organise ideas efficiently. One of the key ways I use GenAI is to draft formal emails to university staff, society representatives, external professionals and other firms and chambers. It helps me structure my messages with clarity and professionalism, ensuring that the tone remains respectful and the content is complete, especially when dealing with complex or sensitive topics.
I also use GenAI to plan personalised study timetables. By inputting details such as upcoming deadlines, revision needs, and my weekly availability, I generate clear and achievable study plans. This helps me keep track of progress and stay on top of both short and long-term academic goals. In legal studies, I use GenAI to summarise lengthy case law. This is especially helpful during revision or when conducting initial readings, as it allows me to quickly identify key facts, legal issues, and principles before diving deeper into the original judgments. Finally, I use GenAI to help plan essay structures. I provide my research question and ideas, and it helps outline logical argument flows. This serves as a starting point for drafting while I maintain full control over the content and analysis.
I remain conscious of the limitations of these tools and make sure all final outputs are my own, guided by academic integrity and personal responsibility
Using GenAI has significantly enhanced the way I approach my studies. It has not only made certain tasks more efficient, such as time management and email drafting, but also encouraged me to engage with my learning in a more strategic and reflective manner. By automating routine processes, I’ve been able to allocate more time to higher-level thinking, such as analysing legal principles, comparing case law, and refining arguments in my written work. In particular, using GenAI to summarise legal cases has helped me become more confident in identifying the ratio decidendi and obiter dicta within judgments.
While I always verify information against the original case reports, having an AI-generated summary as a starting point helps me process large volumes of information quickly, which is crucial in a content-heavy field like law. I also found that using GenAI as a brainstorming partner for essays helped reduce the initial stress of starting assignments. It prompted me to think more critically about the structure and flow of my arguments. Importantly, I remain conscious of the limitations of these tools and make sure all final outputs are my own, guided by academic integrity and personal responsibility.
