Proprietary legal-AI platforms are being integrated into law school curricula, mirroring earlier vendor strategies of providing free access to build brand loyalty. Major vendors like Harvey are partnering with top universities, prompting public claims of primacy and competitive posturing. Embedding AI in legal training carries practical benefits but also raises ethical concerns about workflow, data handling, and professional responsibilities. Using students as early adopters risks normalizing specific tools and could create long-term patterns of use. Training students on legal-specific AI can reduce risky reliance on general consumer chatbots, while institutional choices will shape future legal practice.
Legal technology, like dealing drugs, thrives on getting kids hooked on the free sample. At least that's what hundreds of hours worth of D.A.R.E. propaganda films taught me. It's why law students received Lexis and Westlaw passwords before their dorm rooms - it's never too early to develop brand loyalty. As 3Ls graduate into 1st-year associates and start pulling all nighters on legal research, they instinctively log into whichever system they learned in school.
But the new frontier in legal tech is AI, and the arms race in legal tech just hit the quad. Harvey, the buzziest vendor these days, just announced partnerships with Stanford, UCLA, NYU, and Notre Dame. Notre Dame proudly declared itself " the first " to integrate Harvey into its classrooms, pretending the other schools who've done the exact same thing don't exist and that Notre Dame's contributions are magically more important than any other institution's. College football season is so back!
That said, this isn't a Coke-vs-Pepsi battle where you can hand out samples and call it a day. It's more like giving every law student a free Tesla and hoping none of them drive it straight into a courthouse wall. How AI fits into the legal industry workflow - both practically and, more importantly, ethically - is still up for grabs. Asking law students to be test subjects is a big deal and can have long-term ramifications for how this stuff gets used.
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