It earned about 15 per cent. Today, he says, the same experiment produces work in the A range.
“That changes the dynamic enormously for legal education,” says Forcese, the new Academic Director of the Common Law Section’s Legal Education Futures Project.
The rapidly improving technology helped prompt Forcese last year to approach the Dean of the Common Law Section.
“Law is a text-based discipline,” he explains, “and AI can now perform many tasks traditionally assigned to junior lawyers.” The challenge is to prepare students to use those tools without becoming dependent on them before they have developed the expertise to recognize weak analysis or errors.
Forcese describes this as the twin problem of “never-skilling” and up-skilling. Students need to understand how technology can amplify their abilities, but they must first acquire the knowledge and discernment that allow them to evaluate its output.
That challenge goes to the heart of Pillar 1 of the Common Law Section’s Strategic Plan: Teaching, Learning and Student Success. The pillar calls for “innovative and inclusive legal education in French and English that equips students with ethical foundations, technological readiness and real-world experience.”
Last year, Forcese, along with Professor Marina Pavlović, co-chaired a project to reform the curriculum for the English JD program. This work, which was supported by a committee and extensive consultation, laid important groundwork.
The committee examined a curriculum whose underlying structure, Forcese says, still reflected assumptions inherited from the late 19th and mid-20th centuries. It recommended reducing the credit weight of several traditional first-year courses and creating Lawyering I and Lawyering II—a nine-credit envelope for legal research, writing, analysis, professionalism and other modern competencies.
The reform completed the Common Law Section’s internal approval process in March and is now proceeding through the University’s approval process, with implementation planned for September 2027.
Restructuring the curriculum was only the beginning.
“We created the bucket; now we’ve got to fill the bucket,” Forcese says. Without meaningful pedagogical development, structural reform alone would amount to “rearranging the chairs on the Titanic.”
“If we're going to avoid the iceberg, we now have to focus on using the new curriculum to manifest innovation. That is the interesting intellectual exercise that we must have in place when the new program kicks off in September 2027.”
That is where the Legal Education Futures Project comes in. As Director, Forcese will help shape the new lawyering courses, consider how thematic learning should evolve and explore clearer pathways through the JD’s extensive upper-year offerings.
One emerging idea is to create suggested course “playlists”: adaptable combinations informed by faculty expertise and, potentially, alumni perspectives that could help students chart routes toward interests or careers.
The role also reaches beyond program design. Forcese wants to help colleagues experiment with evidence-based teaching practices without requiring each professor to reinvent an entire course.
He has long used his own classroom as a testing ground. In his courses, students encounter foundational material before class, leaving classroom time for active problem-solving. Layered exercises revisit earlier concepts to strengthen retention. Simulated clients and unfolding crises ask students to provide advice in conditions that resemble practice.
Forcese jokes that these scenarios can make him feel like “a law prof who’s turned into playing Dungeons & Dragons with my students.”
New tools, he adds, have given individual instructors “the powers of a small Hollywood studio.” Yet he resists allowing technology to dictate how a course is taught.
“The tool drove the pedagogy rather than vice versa,” he says of earlier waves of classroom technology. The essential question is always: How do human beings learn, and what makes learning stick?
His new self-paced professional development course, International Law and Armed Conflict, offers one example of that approach, using realistic scenarios to help learners apply international law to difficult decisions. It also reflects the Project’s broader contribution to lifelong professional learning.
Ultimately, Forcese believes graduates need strong foundations, modern research and writing abilities, technological fluency and something no automated system can reliably supply: human judgment. They must also be ready to keep learning.
“Over the course of a career, a lawyer will reinvent themselves repeatedly as the law changes,” he says. “A JD student coming out of a program needs to have learned how to do that.”
Forcese sees the Legal Education Futures Project as an opportunity to rebuild the momentum for pedagogical experimentation that emerged during the COVID pandemic and make it sustainable. His aim is both ambitious and fundamentally human: “We’re not training them to be better robots because the robots are better than we’ll ever be but training them to be better human beings.”
“I think I have one big project left in me,” he says. “This is probably going to be it.”