Author archives

Bonnie Shucha is the Associate Dean for Library and Information Services and Director of the Law Library at the UW Law School. She oversees library operations and guides the Law Library team in fostering research and learning across the Law School community and beyond. She received her J.D. from the UW Law School, a Masters of Library & Information Science and M.A. in History from UW-Milwaukee, and a B.A. in History from UW-Eau Claire. Dean Shucha has presented and published on numerous topics including legal research, legal technology and generative AI, scholarly visibility, Tribal law, and women’s history. She is also the creator and author of the UW Law Library blog, WisBlawg, which provides legal research and tech information with an emphasis on Wisconsin. She is an active member of the American Association of Law Libraries where she served as special interest section and caucus leader. She is also a past president of the Law Librarians Association of Wisconsin. She is a member and former chair of the State Bar of Wisconsin’s Communications Committee and Wisconsin Lawyer editorial board. Dean Shucha co-teaches Advanced Legal Research. In this simulation course, students gain practical, hands-on experience in approaching, conducting, and presenting research in a practice setting.

AI Prompting for Legal Professionals

Technology has advanced tremendously in the 21st century, but “garbage in, garbage out” still applies. Bonnie Shucha discusses how prompting is simply the art of asking generative AI the right question in the right way. Shucha advocates using a systematic approach, such as the “7 Ps Framework,” to help you guide AI more effectively by providing seven key elements to consider when crafting prompts: persona, product, prompt, purpose, prime, privacy, and polish. You won’t always need all seven elements, but understanding each component helps you make deliberate choices about what to include in your prompt.

Subjects: AI, Legal Research

NotebookLM for Lawyers: AI That Focuses on Your Documents

This comprehensive article by Bonnie Schucha explores and demonstrates the capabilities of Google’s NotebookLM, a free document-grounded AI tool designed to work exclusively with the materials you upload, and discusses what it means for an AI to be document grounded, why that matters for legal work, and how to use it effectively while keeping privacy and confidentiality in mind.

Subjects: AI, Information Management, KM, Legal Research, Legal Technology, Search Engines, Technology Trends