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!
From Artificial Lawyer:
Or, as Harvey put it: ‘By making technology a fundamental part of law school education, these institutions are innovators in helping prepare the next generation of lawyers for careers where technology enables and supports more of their work.’
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.
Honestly, this is a success even if all this accomplishes is teaching future lawyers to use legal-specific AI as opposed to giving ChatGPT all your client’s now discoverable information so it can hallucinate up some fake cases.
For the last couple years, the legal tech press corps have asked vendors if they would start giving law students free access to AI tools. And the answers range from flat refusals to hemming and hawing about “well, we’ll see.” AI is expensive and providers seemed unconvinced that the juice was worth the squeeze. But tokens keep getting cheaper and, apparently Harvey has decided free samples have crossed into good investment territory.
This now puts the onus on Harvey’s competitors — both direct and not-exactly-direct — to get in on the youth market. Lexis and Westlaw can’t get caught sitting around while the new kid on the block runs orientation week. They’ve been playing the long con since the Clinton administration, giving away millions in free student access just to make sure no lawyer over 40 can file a brief without a paid subscription. Now that the field of battle has advanced to Lexis+ AI and CoCounsel, it’s not enough to hook students on the base products alone anymore… they need to win hearts and minds for their premium offerings.
Because every good bubble requires companies running up big bills tussling over market share before it bursts!
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
