Harvey expands law school alliance, bringing legal AI to more campuses

Harvey Expands Law School Alliance: What It Means for Faculty, Students, and Firms

Harvey, a generative AI platform built for legal work, announced that it is expanding the law school alliance program it launched last month to additional institutions. The move signals a push to give law students and faculty hands-on access to AI workflows before they enter practice.

For legal professionals, this expansion matters. It builds a talent pipeline familiar with AI-first workflows and sets expectations for how research, drafting, and review will be executed in clinics, coursework, and externships.

What law schools stand to gain

• Curriculum integration: legal research, writing, and clinical courses that include AI-assisted drafting, fact patterns, and issue spotting.
• Faculty support: structured access, sandbox environments, and classroom policies that enforce confidentiality and citation standards.
• Research opportunities: empirical studies on accuracy, bias, and outcomes across practice areas.

How students benefit

• Practical workflows: drafting memos, clause comparisons, discovery requests, brief outlines, and client communication templates.
• Quality control: building habits for verification, citations to primary sources, and redline review.
• Career readiness: familiarity with AI policies, audit trails, and matter-level permissions used by firms.

Use cases that translate to practice

• Litigation: case law summaries with pinned citations, deposition prep outlines, and motion skeletons.
• Transactions: clause benchmarking, term sheet comparisons, and diligence note summaries tied to source documents.
• Compliance: policy drafting with citation mapping to statutes and internal controls.
• Clinics: intake summarization, letter drafting, and checklists with faculty oversight.

What firms and recruiters should watch

• Hiring signals: candidates who can articulate prompts, verification steps, and limits-plus how they preserved privilege and client trust.
• Policy alignment: whether school usage mirrors firm standards on confidentiality, data sharing, and audit logs.
• Training leverage: externship or clinic work that can roll into firm playbooks.

Governance and ethics essentials

• Confidentiality and privilege: no client-identifying data in non-approved environments; use redaction and synthetic examples.
• Citation discipline: always link claims to primary sources; maintain a reference trail for review.
• Accuracy checks: require human-in-the-loop review, redlines, and spot checks against the record.
• Access controls: role-based permissions, matter-level segregation, and export logs.
• Bias and fairness testing: structured evaluation across jurisdictions and fact patterns.

Many states expect lawyers to maintain tech competence. See the ABA's view on competence and technology for context: ABA Model Rule 1.1. For risk frameworks, NIST offers practical guidance: AI Risk Management Framework.

Questions deans and IT should ask before rollout

• Data handling: What is stored, where, and for how long? Is training on school data disabled by default?
• Auditability: Can we export prompts, outputs, and reviewers for coursework and clinic files?
• Source control: Can the tool surface pinned citations with links to primary law and documents?
• Student fairness: How do we grade work that used AI versus work that did not? Are policies clear in syllabi?
• Accessibility: Are accommodations supported for students with disabilities?

Smart next steps for legal leaders

• Define use policies with examples of permitted and prohibited matters.
• Start with sandboxed exercises and non-sensitive data; expand after a pilot and audit.
• Create verification checklists for each course and clinic.
• Align with firm partners on workflows to ease externship and hiring transitions.

If you're building AI fluency across legal roles, you can browse structured options here: Complete AI Training - Courses by Job.

Bottom line: expanding access pushes AI skills upstream-into classrooms and clinics-so new lawyers enter practice with habits that protect clients, respect the record, and speed routine work without sacrificing judgment.