The First AI Powered CLE Tool for Attorneys: How to Use It, How It's Getting Better and More

In 2023, we were proud to launch the first ever AI-powered CLE Learning Assistant, a transformative tool for attorneys delivering instant answers and trusted information from our pool of 2,000+ courses taught by practicing attorneys. We’re excited to share how the learning assistant is being used so far, some tips on how you can get the most out of it, and updates on how we’re making it even more valuable for attorneys.

Where can you find it?

Our Learning Assistant integrates in two key ways:

• Course Center - We introduced a new tab called ‘Ask AI Learning Assistant’ which is a focused Learning Assistant specific to the course the user is watching. It’s a handy way for users to ask questions like ‘summarize this program for me’ so that you can quickly get an overview of what the course is about. It can even link you to a specific timestamp of the video on where the answer is being referenced so that you can understand the entire context better. There’s so much more you can do and everyone should try it out on their own!
• Universal Learning Assistant - We first introduced this global ‘widget’ floating across all pages of our site as a way for all our active subscribers to always have access to the Learning Assistant. We recently moved it to a dedicated Learning Assistant page so that we have more space to expand the functionalities and organize user’s prompts as we continue to evolve the service. The Learning Assistant on this page has the knowledge of our entire course catalog which is made possible by feeding in all our course transcripts into our AI model. Here, users can ask even broader questions like ‘Find courses accredited for ethics in Virginia’ and our Learning Assistant will try to give recommendations along with the specific course links for quick course discovery purposes.

Course Center Learning Assistant

Learning Assistant Page

How It Works: Unveiling the AI Behind Our Learning Assistant

The Learning Assistant works using RAG - resource augmented generation. When you submit a query, the Learning Assistant will use semantic search on an archive of transcript excerpts and course descriptions to find the content most relevant to your query or request, then it will use that content as a source of truth when generating a response. This lets us link responses to citations such as links to videos and timestamps to skip to.

Learning Assistant Got Smarter

About two months ago, we expanded our Learning Assistant capabilities to answer more accreditation-related questions (a highly requested feature) specific to jurisdictions as we were able to feed in our courses’ accredited jurisdictions and credit types information on top of course transcripts to our AI model to make it a lot more useful based on our customers' feedback. Along with our updated course catalog with a more powerful search engine that we launched last year, this is another example of our commitment to ensure our customers can easily find the courses that are relevant to them even more quickly.

A Reliable Source of Information

Since day one launching our AI-powered Learning Assistant tool, we have consistently communicated that all the answers provided are only sourced from our accredited courses with practicing legal professionals and nothing else. We are aware AI can ‘hallucinate’ at times even with a large language model like ChatGPT and that’s why we put in extra effort to make sure it doesn’t happen in our Learning Assistant, since we know how important and accurate our answers need to be. This is always going to be the number one priority as we keep evolving the product in the future.

Used by Over 1,000 Attorneys (and Growing)

Since we officially launched our AI-powered Learning Assistant back in October, we already have over 1,000 unique customers asking over 3,000 questions against our entire course catalog of more than two thousand courses on various important legal topics.

What’s Coming Next

We will continue to refine our AI model to cover more use cases as we gather more feedback from attorneys. We at Lawline sincerely believe leveraging AI can ultimately achieve our vision to become the Preferred, Everyday Learning Resource for Attorneys to empower their pursuit of justice.