Harvey Law School!

Harvey shipped a free certification course for law students today. Law schools that have not yet signed on to the Harvey Law School Program should do so this week.

Harvey has launched Harvey Law Schools: Preparing for Legal Work. Seven modules: working with Harvey responsibly, transactional work, litigation, in-house, public interest and public sector, optional exercises, capstone assessment. Free to students at the forty-plus partner schools in Harvey's Law School Program, which launched in August 2025 with Stanford, UCLA, NYU, and Notre Dame and has expanded steadily since. The capstone produces a shareable certificate of completion. That last detail is the one most law professors will read past and most law students will not. The certificate is the news.

A vendor has now created what few law schools have been agile enough to produce: a structured, sequenced, AI-fluency curriculum aimed at law students at every level, taught by people with domain expertise, and credentialed with a piece of paper the student can put on LinkedIn as soon as it is received. Despite the name of "Harvey Law School," Harvey is not pretending this is a JD. It is (s0 far) offering a focused training course that prepares a student to be useful on day one of an internship. That is good enough for now.

Two things follow.

The first is that students are going to want this credential whether the academy approves of it or not. The reasons are not subtle. A 1L who can show a hiring partner that she has completed a structured Harvey course has something to put on her resume that the 1L next to her does not. The hiring partner has been told by her firm's innovation committee that the firm needs lawyers who can use these tools competently. The 1L knows that. The hiring partner knows that. The credential closes the loop. The market signal is going to be loud. The supply-side answer for now is a vendor course. Where the supply-side answer should come from in the future is a question law school deans and university administrators will need to answer in the next twelve months.

The second is that Harvey is unlikely to be the only vendor in this market for long. When a category leader gives away a credentialed training product to law students, competitors notice. I do not know what Clio, Legora, LexisNexis, or Thomson Reuters will do, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I do know is that every one of these companies and every smaller player in an ever-more-crowded space has a strong financial incentive to addict and credential the people who will use their product. (And each of them need a well compensated "Dean" of their programs). The academy's incentive structure may be slightly different with a greater emphasis on concepts and generalizable AI skills. Whether and how to that difference plays out is a separate conversation. This week's conversation is simpler.

If you are a law school dean and your school is not yet in the Harvey Law School Program, sign your school up this week. Email Harvey at lawschools@harvey.ai. Do not wait for the faculty committee. Do not wait for the next deans' council meeting. Sign up. The cost as I understand it is very low. I have yet to see a downside. Your students get access to a free certification their peers at forty-plus other schools already have, including Stanford, UCLA, NYU, and Notre Dame. The students at those schools will arrive at OCI in the fall with a credential your students will not have. The disadvantage your students will face is not a thing you want to explain to your applicants, your alumni, or your board. By the way, if you think vendor AI literacy training is the threat, wait until the vendor figures out it can teach the doctrinal courses pretty well too.

If you are a faculty member at a school that has signed on, the move is to take the course yourself. Do not delegate evaluation of it to the library. The course looks to be short, the modules are public-facing, and the students are going to be taking it. The faculty who have actually completed it are the ones who will be able to talk to students intelligently about what it covers, what it omits, and how it fits with the doctrinal work the students are doing in the same semester. The faculty who have not completed it will be unable to answer those questions and will, before long, find themselves on the wrong side of a generational divide they did not have to land on.

I have a longer piece coming on what legal education should be building in response to all of this — growth so fast that even enthusiasts like me are struggling to stay current. That piece argues for something more ambitious than vendor certifications. The shorter argument for today is harder to dodge. An industry that was producing breathless quarterly announcements eighteen months ago is now attracting billions in investor capital and shipping concrete credentials with shareable certificates and forty-plus institutional partners. You do not have to love Harvey. You do not have to think it has the best technology. You do have to recognize that it has gotten very good, that it has become the largest player in legal AI, and that the skills students learn using it will transfer to whatever comes next. Time to get on board.