Carolyn V. Williams Named Among Top 50 Legal Innovators in Academia
UND School of Law professor recognized nationally for advancing legal education in the age of generative AI
University of North Dakota School of Law Professor Carolyn V. Williams has been named one of the Top 50 Legal Innovators in Academia for 2026 by The National Law Review and Wickard. The inaugural national recognition honors educators, administrators, researchers, and academic leaders who are helping shape the future of legal education through innovation, technology, leadership, scholarship, and new approaches to legal training.
Williams has become a national leader in conversations about how generative artificial intelligence is reshaping legal education and the practice of law. In May 2023, shortly after the public release of ChatGPT began raising new questions for legal educators, Williams and Dr. Kirsten Davis of Stetson University College of Law co-founded the Legal Writing and Generative AI Convo Group. What began as an effort to create a space for legal writing professors to work through those questions together has grown into a national community of more than 550 law professors. The group meets monthly to explore emerging issues involving generative AI and legal education, bringing together faculty from law schools across the country to share ideas, teaching practices, research, and approaches to the rapidly changing technology.
Williams’s scholarship has also focused on preparing legal education for technological change. Her article, Bracing for Impact: Revising Legal Writing Assessments Ahead of the Collision of Generative AI and the NextGen Bar Exam, received the 2025 Teresa Godwin Phelps Award for Scholarship in Legal Communication from the Legal Writing Institute. The award recognizes outstanding scholarship that strengthens the discipline of legal communication, and the winning article examines how the simultaneous emergence of generative AI and the NextGen Bar Exam requires law schools to reconsider how they teach and assess legal research, reasoning, and writing. Williams’s work on generative AI has also extended to legal citation. As author of the eighth edition of the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation, she developed a new rule addressing when and how lawyers and legal scholars should acknowledge or cite the use of generative AI.
The Top 50 honorees were selected through an independent evaluation process by a national Selection Committee composed of leaders from legal academia, the judiciary, law firms, legal technology companies, and other areas of the profession. Nominees were evaluated based on innovation and originality, impact on legal education, leadership and implementation, influence beyond their home institutions, and the potential long-term significance of their work.
