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About Vanderbilt AI Law Lab

The Vanderbilt AI Law Lab (VAILL) is a research initiative at Vanderbilt University Law School dedicated to studying and advancing the responsible use of artificial intelligence in legal education, legal practice, and the justice system. VAILL brings together law faculty, technologists, and students to explore how AI is reshaping the legal profession — and to ensure that legal professionals are equipped to use these tools effectively and ethically.

About This Guide

The VAILL Faculty Guide to AI Agents is a resource designed to equip law faculty with practical AI skills. We start from the assumption that most readers have little or no coding experience — and that this should not be a barrier to using powerful AI tools.

The guide covers the full spectrum of AI tools relevant to legal professionals:

  • Chatbot fundamentals — getting real value from ChatGPT, Claude, and similar tools through structured prompting and project organization.
  • Coding agents — understanding and using agentic AI tools like Claude Code that go beyond chat to read files, draft documents, conduct research, and execute multi-step workflows.
  • Legal-specific workflows — contract review, brief drafting, literature reviews, syllabus design, exam drafting, and more.
  • Building your own — designing custom skills and workflows tailored to your practice or research.

Our goal is not to turn law faculty into programmers. It is to give you enough understanding and hands-on experience to direct AI tools confidently — the same way you might direct a research assistant without needing to do every step yourself.

Every page on this site is designed to work independently, so you can work through the material at your own pace or share individual guides with colleagues.

How This Site Was Built

This site is built with MkDocs Material, an open-source documentation framework. It is hosted on GitHub Pages and auto-deploys on every push via GitHub Actions.

Source code: github.com/willimj3/vaill-coding-agents-workshop

Framework: MkDocs Material with custom Vanderbilt-branded theming (black/gold palette, Fraunces display font, Inter body text).

The content was developed collaboratively with AI assistance — which is fitting, given the subject matter. Every workflow and technique described on this site has been tested by the VAILL team.

License

This project is released under the MIT License — you are free to use, modify, and redistribute anything here however you want. We ask only that you credit the Vanderbilt AI Law Lab if you adapt substantial portions of the material.

Contact & Feedback

We welcome feedback from readers and the broader legal education community. If something on this site is unclear, broken, or could be improved, please open a GitHub issue or reach out through the VAILL website.

Acknowledgments

This site was adapted from the claudeblattman open-source project by Chris Blattman, a political economist at the University of Chicago who built and shared an AI workflow system for academic research management. We are grateful for his willingness to share that work under an open-source license, which provided the foundation for the site architecture, CSS theming, and several of the essentials guides.

The VAILL team has substantially adapted the content for a legal audience, added law-specific workflow guides, and developed new sections on coding agents, legal practice, and legal academia.

Thanks also to Anthropic for building Claude Code and to the broader open-source community behind MkDocs Material.