Legal Education requires Competence in a GenAI World: Why Legal Knowledge is not Enough

Generative Artificial Intelligence (‘GenAI’) is reshaping what it means to educate competent lawyers. This article devises a Legal Competence Framework based on Le Deist and Winterton’s synthesis of the competence literature augmented by the NSW Solicitor Capability Framework. The Legal Competence Framework delineates the skills students require in their legal education through four interrelated competence dimensions of cognitive competence, functional competence, social competence, and meta-competence. This Framework enables analysis of GenAI’s impact on legal education and assessment. Law is among the most heavily regulated fields of tertiary education and the article seeks to disentangle the complex obligations imposed by the Priestley 11, the Higher Education Standards Framework, the Australian Qualifications Framework and the Threshold Learning Outcomes through applying the Legal Competence Framework. The analysis considers GenAI’s disruption of each learning framework and the impact on learning and assessment, including how GenAI increases the need for social and meta competence. The article explores how GenAI severs the link between traditional unsupervised assessment output and genuine competence discouraging the effortful struggle through which competence develops. It concludes that, whilst supervised assessment remains critical, unsupervised assessment is also essential but its design must shift to focus on assessing learning process rather than output.