Here's a number that should get your attention: Ropes & Gray now allows first-year associates to allocate up to 20% of their billable hours—nearly 400 hours annually—to AI training and experimentation. At a first-year billing rate, that's roughly $350,000 worth of time that the firm is investing in AI skills for lawyers who just graduated.

Latham & Watkins recently packed more than 400 first-year associates into a Washington, D.C. hotel for a mandatory two-day "AI Academy"—and gives associates hours credit for participation.

The message from Biglaw is unmistakable: AI mastery is now a core professional competency, and firms are willing to pay handsomely for associates to develop it.

Which raises an obvious question for law students: If firms value this skill that much for people who just graduated, why wait until you're on the clock to learn it?

You're Already Trained for This

Here's the good news: your legal education has already given you the foundational skills that make for excellent AI prompting. Legal reasoning, structured argumentation, issue spotting, and precision with language? That's exactly what effective AI use requires.

We wrote about this in detail in our Newsletter post: Why Your Law Degree Makes You a Natural AI Powerhouse—the short version is that the analytical frameworks you've been drilling since 1L translate directly to getting better outputs from AI tools.

The gap isn't aptitude. It's application and practice. Working with AI requires a ton of trial and error and iterations.

You have the raw materials. What you need now is deliberate effort to build the skill before you're drowning in billable hour requirements.

The Biglaw AI Arms Race

Make no mistake: large law firms are treating AI training as a strategic priority, not a nice-to-have.

Ropes & Gray's "TrAIlblazers" Program

Ropes & Gray's "TrAIlblazers" program represents one of the first formal attempts by a major law firm to give attorneys credit toward their billable-hour requirements for time spent exploring and developing AI skills.

The specifics are significant. With a first-year billable target of 1,900 hours, associates can now dedicate up to 400 of those hours to AI training, simulations, and workflow testing. Activities include individual experimentation, group learning, and mentoring circles where associates discuss what's working and what opportunities they've identified.

Jane Rogers, a finance partner and member of Ropes & Gray's management committee, framed the investment clearly: the firm wants junior lawyers "to see the importance of this transformative technology, and also to empower them to have the time to spend to learn the tools."

This isn't a side project. It's a structural change to how the firm evaluates associate performance.

Latham & Watkins AI Academy

Latham has taken a different but equally serious approach. The firm launched its AI Academy in October 2024—a first-of-its-kind program featuring immersive, skills-based training at the intersection of AI and legal practice.

This past November, Latham gathered its entire first-year associate class for a mandatory two-day training covering tools like Harvey and Microsoft Copilot, governance and verification protocols, and practical AI applications across practice areas. Senior litigator Michael Rubin described AI as a "generational opportunity," urging associates to treat these tools as capabilities that will expand the quality and speed of client service.

The firm's message was unambiguous: AI proficiency is now a core expectation, not an optional add-on.

What This Means for Your Career

The competitive implications are clear. Students who arrive AI-fluent will have a meaningful advantage over those who expect to learn on the job. As Notre Dame Law School Dean Marcus Cole put it when announcing his school's partnership with Harvey: "Artificial intelligence is here. It is increasingly more sophisticated and will rapidly become more integral to our work. Law firms and organizations will expect expertise in the use of AI."

Firms are actively looking for this. They're investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in training programs because they need associates who can hit the ground running with these tools.

You can be one of them. Or you can spend your first year playing catch-up.

The 3L (and 2L) Opportunity

Let's be honest: the 3L curriculum doesn't add much value to your degree and career. Most of your fundamentals are built during the first year or two of law school.

Yes, upper-level courses expand your knowledge. Yes, clinics and externships provide valuable experience. But the marginal utility of your 14th elective seminar versus genuine AI proficiency? I don't even think it's a close call.

A lot of people worry about bar courses. The reality is bar prep is going to re-teach you the doctrine you need in the manner you need it. Much of what you're doing is credential-building, networking, and checking boxes. The actual learning curve flattens significantly after your first year.

Reframe Your Time

You likely have 15-20+ hours per week of discretionary time as a 2L or 3L. What if you redirected even half of that toward AI mastery?

Consider the math: 5-10 hours per week dedicated to AI learning over your 2L and 3L years equals 500-1,000 hours of deliberate practice.

Now compare that to associates at Ropes & Gray fighting to carve out AI learning time while billing 1,900+ hours annually. They're getting 400 hours if they're lucky—and that's a groundbreaking program that most firms haven't replicated.

You have a structural advantage right now.

What to Master: A Practical Curriculum

Not all AI skills are created equal. Here's a tiered approach based on what will actually matter for your legal career.

Tier 1: General-Purpose AI Prompting (The Foundation)

Before you touch any legal-specific tool, you need to understand how large language models work and how to communicate with them effectively. This means getting hands-on experience with ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini.

Focus on prompt engineering fundamentals: structured prompting (role, context, task, constraints, output format), iterative refinement, few-shot examples, and chain-of-thought reasoning. These skills transfer across every AI platform you'll encounter.

Practice on actual legal tasks: summarizing cases, drafting memo sections, analyzing contract provisions, outlining arguments. The goal isn't to produce final work product—it's to develop intuition for what these tools can and can't do.

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I recommend buying a few dollars worth of credit on the Anthropic developer console to test and evaluate prompts in a structured and sophisticated manner.

Time investment: 50-100 hours to reach competency, with ongoing practice thereafter.

You already have free access to Westlaw and Lexis as a law student. Most students barely scratch the surface of what these platforms can do, especially their newer AI features.

Westlaw AI and Lexis+ AI both offer increasingly sophisticated capabilities: natural language search, AI-assisted document analysis, brief analysis tools, generative AI drafting, and practical guidance features. These are the tools I think you'll eventually use every day in practice, and they're evolving rapidly.

The time to learn them is now, while your access is free and your schedule is flexible. Once you're billing, it will become much more difficult.

Time investment: 30-50 hours of deliberate practice.

Harvey has been aggressively expanding into law schools. The company launched its Law School Program in late 2024 with Stanford, NYU, Michigan, UCLA, Texas, and Notre Dame, and has since expanded to include Chicago, Penn, Vanderbilt, WashU, Boston University, Fordham, BYU, Georgia, Villanova, Baylor, and SMU.

In the UK, Harvey recently partnered with Oxford, King's College London, The University of Law, and BPP to integrate its platform into legal education.

If your school is a partner, take full advantage. Students and faculty get access to the Harvey platform, and the company supports curriculum integration and training.

If your school isn't a partner yet, advocate for it. Schools can reach out to lawschools@harvey.ai to join the program. Given that Harvey is already used by Magic Circle and Am Law 100 firms, getting familiar with it before you start practice is an obvious advantage.

King's College London has gone even further, launching what they call the world's first AI Literacy Programme that gives every law student access to four major legal AI tools—Harvey, Luminance, Legora, and Lucio—backed by a 12-week online course and weekly practitioner workshops. Push your school to develop similar programs.

Tier 4: Advanced Skills (Differentiation)

If you want to truly stand out, go beyond using AI tools to building with them.

Vibe coding (using AI to write code without being a developer) opens up possibilities that most lawyers never consider: building simple legal tools, automating document processing, creating custom workflows. You don't need to become a software engineer—you need to be able to describe what you want and iterate with an AI coding assistant until it works.

AI agents and workflow automation take this further. Understanding how to chain multiple AI operations together, build multi-step automated processes, and design systems that handle routine tasks is where the real leverage emerges.

Will every associate need these skills? Probably not. But the ones who have them will be the ones building the tools their colleagues use.

A Practical Strategy

Immediate Actions (This Week)

  1. Set up accounts. Get Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus (or start with free tiers). Or go with Gemini: Google is offering Gemini Pro accounts for free for one year exclusively for students. Pick one and commit to using it daily.
  2. Audit your Westlaw and Lexis access. Explore the AI features you've been ignoring. Spend an hour just clicking around.
  3. Check if your school has Harvey, Legora, or other legal AI partnerships. If it does, sign up immediately. If it doesn't, email your dean's office asking about it.
  4. Start a practice log. Document what you try, what works, what doesn't. This becomes your portfolio.

Semester-Long Commitment

Dedicate 5-10 hours per week minimum. Use AI tools for your actual coursework (within your school's academic integrity policies). The goal is integration, not separation—you should be using AI as part of your normal workflow, not as a special project.

Build a collection of prompts and workflows that work for legal tasks. Iterate on them. By the end of the semester, you should have a toolkit you can bring to any firm.

The Job Search Angle

AI fluency is a differentiator in interviews. Firms are asking about it, and most candidates have nothing substantive to say.

Have specific examples ready: "I used Claude to analyze discovery documents in my clinic and developed a workflow that cut initial review time by 40%." "I built a custom prompt for contract analysis that I refined over six months."

This separates you from the 95% of candidates who will say "I'm comfortable with technology" and leave it at that. Or worse, the ones that say they know how to use AI, but simple resort to using ChatGPT as a glorified search engine.

Addressing Potential Concerns

"My school doesn't have Harvey access."

Harvey is expanding rapidly, but even if your school never gets it, general-purpose AI skills transfer to any platform. The fundamentals of effective prompting work whether you're using Claude, ChatGPT, Harvey, or whatever comes next. And Westlaw and Lexis AI features are available to virtually all law students right now.

"I don't have time."

You have more discretionary time now than you will for the next 5-10 years (even if you don't end up in Biglaw). First-year associates at top firms bill 1,900+ hours while juggling training, business development expectations, and the learning curve of practice. Full time attorneys in public interest roles and mid or small size firms also have significant work requirements that far exceed law school expectations. You have comparatively infinite flexibility.

It's not about adding AI practice on top of everything else, it's about substituting it for lower-value activities. Use AI while doing the work you're already doing.

"Isn't AI going to make lawyers obsolete?"

I think the better way to think of it is that AI is going to augment and transform the work lawyers do. The lawyers who master AI will excel; the lawyers who don't won't. That's the more realistic scenario.

AI doesn't replace human judgement.

The Window Is Open

Biglaw firms are now paying associates to spend hundreds of hours learning what you can learn for free, right now, while you're still in school.

Latham is running mandatory AI academies. Ropes & Gray is treating AI training as equivalent to billable work. Harvey is signing up law schools as fast as they can process the paperwork. The industry is sending every possible signal that this skill matters.

Many law students (and perhaps even lawyers) aren't paying attention. They'll graduate, start practice, and scramble to learn tools they could have mastered with years of runway.

You don't have to be one of them.

Your legal training prepared you for this. The analytical rigor, the structured reasoning, the attention to precise language—it all transfers directly to effective AI use. The only missing piece is deliberate practice.

Start today. Pick one AI tool, one legal task, and spend an hour experimenting. Then do it again tomorrow. And the day after that.

The associates who arrive AI-fluent will be the ones who get the interesting work, the better mentorship, and the faster track to responsibility. The technology is free to access. The time is available. The only question is whether you'll use it.