Voices in Law

Practice Setting

Where a legal professional works: a private firm of any size, a prosecutor’s or public defender’s office, a court, a company’s in-house legal department, or a legal aid or public interest organization. The setting shapes who the clients are, how the work is paid for, and what a hard day looks like. A cast that spans settings shows you more of the profession than ten people from one kind of office.

Legal Role

The job a person does inside the legal system: attorney, paralegal, judge, court clerk, mediator, legislator, law professor, and more. Each role has its own way in and its own limits. Activity 3 drew the line that matters most for a paralegal, between legal work done under an attorney’s supervision and the practice of law itself.

Simulated Interview

A conversation in which an AI plays a fictional person you question the way a reporter would. The person is invented, but what they say about the profession, from salaries to licensing rules, is meant to be real, so each interview is both a story and a set of claims to check. A real interview with a working professional can replace any simulated one.

Open-Ended Question

A question that cannot be answered yes or no, such as “How did you get started?” or “What surprised you in your first year?” It invites the stories, scenes, and quotable lines that a closed question shuts off. The best follow-up is often the plainest one: “Can you give me an example?”

AI Hallucination

A fluent, confident statement from an AI that is false: an invented statute, a wrong salary figure, a licensing rule that does not exist. Role-play makes it more likely, because a model asked to play a seasoned professional tries to sound like one.

Fact-Check

Confirming a factual claim against an authoritative source and recording the result with that source. The invented parts of a character, such as a name and a life story, need no checking; their claims about the profession, the law, and the courts do. A claim that turns out to be wrong still goes in your journal, marked INCORRECT, with the correct information.

Course Themes

The eleven topics of this course, which your interviews should touch. They are Rule of Law and Jurisprudence, Legal Education, the U.S. Constitution, Sources of Law, the Court System, Litigation (civil and criminal), Criminal Law, Torts, Contracts, Property Law, and Ethics and Professionalism. Each interview connects to the two to four themes that fit that person’s work, and across all ten you should reach at least eight.

Part 1: Take the Assignment

You are a staff writer for your college’s magazine, The Undergraduate. Your editor has assigned you a major feature titled “So You Want to Work in Law? A Guide to the Legal Profession.” To prepare, you need to interview ten legal professionals from different sectors and write a journal entry on each. The entries are the raw material the article would be written from, and they are the whole assignment: you do not write the article. You will use AI to create ten fictional professionals and interview them. If you can interview real lawyers, paralegals, judges, or other legal professionals, those interviews can replace AI ones, but you need ten either way.

Part 2: Build Your Cast

Run the Cast Builder to create the people you will interview. Run it several times and mix and match characters until you have ten who interest you. Then refine them: “Make #3 more (insert personality trait),” or “Change #7 to someone working in environmental law in Montana.” Aim for range on every dimension you can: role, practice setting, practice area, geography, career stage, background, personality, and outlook.

Part 3: Run the Interviews

Start each interview with the Interview Simulator, which has the AI play your interviewee. Keep the conversation open and wide-ranging, so the character’s personality comes through and their facts get tested. Ask open-ended questions about how they got started, what a typical day looks like, and what challenges and surprises they have faced. Ask for vivid scenes, specific examples, and memorable quotes, and try a few off-the-wall questions to see how they respond. Plan for 15 to 30 minutes of conversation per interview, copy memorable quotes as you go, and push back when a claim sounds off. If the AI drops character, remind it: “Please stay in character as [Name] and respond as they would.” Across the interviews, let the course themes come up where they fit each person’s work, two to four per interview, and do not force one that does not. The prompts are starting points, so adjust them or write your own.

Part 4: Write the Journal Entries

After each interview, write a one-page journal entry with five sections. The Introduction gives the person’s full name, current position and organization, and location, followed by a 2–3 sentence background on their education and career path. The Interview Summary is a narrative of the interview: how the person entered their career, what their work involves now, and the main challenges they face day to day. It connects 2–4 course topics to their experience and includes 2–3 direct quotes that capture their voice. The Personal Reflection is your honest response: whether the interview felt authentic (for an AI interview), what surprised you about the career, what you learned, and whether this path interests you. It does not have to be positive if the interview was not. The Fact Check lists and verifies 2–3 factual claims from your interviewee in the format below. The Interview Links section gives 1–2 clickable links to your AI chat conversations.

Fact Check format

✓ VERIFIED: [Claim] (Source: [URL or citation])

✓ VERIFIED: [Claim] (Source: [URL or citation])

✗ INCORRECT: [Claim] – Actually: [Correct information] (Source: [URL or citation])

Use an AI image tool, such as Gemini, Grok, or ChatGPT, to create realistic professional headshots for 2–3 of your interviewees, like the photos on a law firm’s site or a LinkedIn profile. Work them into those journal entries creatively. You do not need one for every interviewee, but if you are having fun, make as many as you like.

Part 5: Assemble the PDF

Put the project together as one 11-page PDF. Page 1 is a cover page with your name, the course name and semester, and the date. Below that, write a 200–300 word reflection on the project. Say what you enjoyed, what you learned about the legal field, and what surprised you in the interviews. Then say which careers interested you most and how the project deepened your understanding of the course topics. Pages 2 through 11 are the ten journal entries. Format it with care.

The journal is worth 100 points. Interview quality counts for 25: realistic conversations with specific details, memorable quotes, and authentic voices. Diversity of interviewees counts for 10: ten distinct roles, locations, practice areas, career stages, and perspectives. Course theme integration counts for 15, with at least eight themes worked naturally across the interviews. Fact-checking counts for 15, with at least 20 verified claims in all and a credible source cited for each. The cover reflection and the personal reflections count for 15 together, for thoughtful and honest writing. Formatting and presentation count for 5: a professional PDF with consistent formatting, headshots, and working chat links. The chat link in Part 6 counts for 15. Post the PDF as the Project instructions describe. To earn the remaining 20 points, reply to at least four different classmates. In each reply, point to one of their interviews, a quote, a fact check, or a career, and say what it showed you about working in law or how it compares with one of yours.

Part 6: Share Chat Link

Include one AI chat link with a 1–2 sentence explanation of what the conversation shows and why you chose to share it.

Cast Builder

Structured output with named dimensions of variety. Listing the dimensions and fixing the fields for each person keeps the model from handing you ten versions of the same big-city litigator. Running it more than once gives you a bigger pool to choose from.

Interview Simulator

Role assignment with an accuracy rule. The persona is invented, but the prompt requires real facts about the profession and an admission when the model is unsure. That turns each interview into material you can fact-check, and a character who never hedges is the one to check hardest.