How Do Law Students Use GenAI Chatbots?

There is already a burgeoning literature exploring how GenAI chatbots are changing how students across higher education do academic research. Notwithstanding some of the wide-ranging claims made by proponents and detractors of these tools, one empirical question has received very little attention to date: how do students actually use these tools? Taking legal research as its focus, this paper draws on a dataset of 128 example chat conversations from 85 law students. This reveals a wide typology of uses that goes beyond informal retrieval; what I characterise here as explaining, producing, practicing and finding. This article considers the implications of these findings for how students find legal sources and seeks to understand them.