By week three, your research memo first draft is on your desk before lunch.

Who this is for

Three readers, one course. Senior associates carrying 1,800–2,200 billed hours. Junior partners who still draft and now also direct. Law firm operations leaders — the COO (Chief Operating Officer), the Director of Practice Operations, the legal-ops manager who owns realization, utilization, and the firm's technology stack across practice groups. Of counsel who run their own books inside a regional or AmLaw 100–200 (American Lawyer top-200) firm fall in here too. Boutique litigators and transactional attorneys whose realization rate moves when their first draft is sharper.

The senior-associate buyer wants to keep more of their billed hours and stop losing evenings to drafting drag. The junior-partner buyer wants the same for themselves and wants their team to stop sending up first drafts that need rework. The operations leader buys for the firm — five seats here, a litigation group there — and wants the manager reporting that lets a managing partner see realization gains by associate. All three problems share a curriculum.

Not BigLaw equity partners — the AI procurement question at AmLaw 50 firms is being decided at the firm level, often by a CIO (Chief Information Officer) and a Harvey AI contract. Not solo practitioners — the math here assumes you bill out of a firm with a CFO who tracks realization.

If you're the person whose desk the research memo lands on at 4 p.m. on a Thursday and still has to be defensible by Friday morning — or the person whose budget that desk sits inside — this is for you.

The opportunity cost

Thomson Reuters' 2025 Future of Professionals Report puts the number at 80% of legal professionals expecting high or transformational AI impact within five years, up from 77% in 2024. The same study found lawyers now expect AI to free up four hours per week within the next year and twelve hours per week within five — roughly 200 hours and 600 hours per attorney respectively. 22% of firms now report visible AI-driven revenue gains today, versus single digits twelve months earlier. The honest read: a meaningful share of your peers at neighboring firms — and inside your own firm — are already running first-pass research, document triage, and client-update drafting through Claude or ChatGPT. Some learned in a structured way. Most are improvising.

Either way, the realization-rate gap is opening.

Mid-tier firms run an 88% realization rate. Top performers clear 95%. The leak between those two numbers is overwhelmingly the part of associate work clients won't pay for at senior rates — bloated research lines, junior-quality first drafts that need partner rework, deposition outlines that read like a digest of every deposition the associate has ever seen.

A senior associate billing 1,950 hours at $550/hr blended with 88% realization collects roughly $944K of receivable work. Lift realization two points by producing defensible first drafts that survive partner review without write-down, and you've recaptured roughly $19K. Recover 80 billable hours that used to be eaten by Bluebook formatting and fact-pattern extraction, and you've added another $44K. The associate down the hall who's already doing this isn't doing it because they're smarter. They're doing it because they figured out the workflow first.

This course is the structured version of what they figured out.

What changes for you in six weeks

Concrete behavior shifts, mapped to the curriculum.

Week 1 — Foundations

You stop pasting raw client data into a public chat window. You learn what an LLM (Large Language Model) actually does and where it lies. You set up your environment with the redaction discipline a lawyer needs — names, matter numbers, PII (personally identifiable information), NDA-protected (non-disclosure-agreement) material — before any of it goes near Claude.

Week 2 — Email triage and client comms

Monday morning's 47 unread messages collapse into three that need you today, six this week, and the rest filed. The Friday update to a difficult client gets drafted from the matter timeline in eight minutes instead of forty. The associate who spent two billable hours per week composing client-status emails reclaims those hours for substantive work.

Week 3 — Document drafting

First-pass research memo on a question you already understand: drafted by Claude from your case notes, structured the way your supervising partner reads, with the cases organized by holding rather than by date. You spend your time on the legal judgment — distinguishing the controlling case from the persuasive one, deciding what argument actually wins — not on Bluebook compliance and string-cite formatting.

Week 4 — Meeting and deposition prep

A deposition outline drafted from the document production in the time it used to take to skim it. A witness-prep memo organized by the three theories of the case rather than the four boxes of documents. Pre-reads for partner meetings that tell you the question being asked instead of recapping the file.

Weeks 5–6 — The Playbook compounds

The prompts you wrote in weeks 1–4 are now pinned, named, and ready to run on tomorrow's matter. Contract markup triage — the redline-with-rationale pattern — runs in 15 minutes on a 40-page MSA (Master Services Agreement). The client-update template runs on autopilot every Friday afternoon. You stop writing prompts from scratch. You start running a system.

The behavioral change isn't “you save time.” It's that the part of your week clients write down — the drafting drag — stops being a tax on your realization.

The Playbook for lawyers

The Playbook is the persistent surface of the course. It's where the prompts you write during the six weeks live, named and pinned, so the work doesn't evaporate when the course ends.

Saved prompts a senior associate ends up pinning by week three:

• research-memo-three-pass — first pass extracts the question and the controlling authority; second pass drafts the analysis section with case-by-case treatment; third pass tightens to your supervising partner's preferred memo length and structure.
• document-triage — runs across a 200-document production and sorts by relevance to the legal theory you specify, with one-line summaries of the documents you should pull for closer review.
• redline-with-rationale — markup of opposing counsel's draft with the rationale for each proposed change, organized by deal point, ready to walk a junior partner through.
• client-update-template — Friday update from the matter activity log, in the register you already use with that client. Calibrated separately for the General Counsel client and the founder client.
• deposition-outline-from-production — outline organized by your three theories, with documents tagged to the questions they support.

These are the four or five prompts you actually use every week. The Playbook is what makes them findable when you need them — which is the difference between AI as a novelty and AI as a tool.

Why this versus the alternatives

Harvey AI

Different audience, different sale. Harvey is firm-level, partner-driven, sold to General Counsel of AmLaw 50 firms with a six-figure annual contract and a multi-month rollout. If your firm has Harvey, this course teaches you how to use it well. If your firm is a year away from Harvey, this course teaches you how to deliver the realization gains today, with a $20/month Claude Pro account and a workflow you actually run.

LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, generic AI courses

Generic AI productivity content. Built for “knowledge workers.” None of it knows the difference between a research memo and a deposition outline, or why the realization rate is the metric your CFO actually tracks.

Free YouTube content

No completion. No structure. No compounding asset. The Playbook is the thing you keep. A YouTube playlist is the thing you bookmark and forget.

Your firm's internal AI rollout

Most mid-tier firms are deploying Microsoft Copilot or a Microsoft 365 AI add-on. Different tool. Useful for Word and Outlook integration. Not a curriculum, not a workflow, and not built around the parts of an attorney's day where the realization leak actually lives. The two are complements, not substitutes — Copilot integrates AI into your existing tooling; this course teaches you what to do with it.

On confidentiality and privilege

Attorney-client privilege is structural, not negotiable. A lawyer who treats it as a soft constraint isn't the lawyer this course is written for, and a course that waved at it would deserve the eye-roll. So the first guardrail in the curriculum is the one that sits closest to this concern.

Module 1 Lesson 4 teaches redaction as the first guardrail — not as a footnote, as the lesson itself. Client identifying information, deal names, opposing counsel correspondence, fact patterns with PII (personally identifiable information): none of that goes into Claude raw. You use placeholders — [CLIENT], [MATTER], [OPPOSING COUNSEL] — and you ask Claude to work with the structure, not the details. Every practice tool in the course bakes redaction-before-paste into the workflow; the triage and board-update practice tools run an automatic redaction preflight before anything reaches the model.

On the deployment side: most mid-tier and Big Law firms are already running enterprise Claude or Microsoft Copilot deployments with the firm's own administrative controls. Anthropic's enterprise data posture is that API traffic on the enterprise plan is not used for training, and retention is configurable. The course is about the workflow, not about pasting privileged content into a public model — and the same workflow runs identically on a firm's enterprise tenant. What this course teaches managers is how to use those deployments well.

A note on CLE accreditation

We are not yet accredited for CLE (Continuing Legal Education) credit.

We are pursuing CLE accreditation with state bar associations as the program scales. Worth flagging because many associates and partners route CLE spend through firm reimbursement budgets — that path may take a quarter or two before we can offer credit hours. Several alumni have successfully reimbursed the course as a professional development expense rather than under the CLE line; the champion one-pager linked below has the language firms have used for that.

If CLE credit is a hard requirement for your firm's reimbursement, talk to us before purchase. We can tell you which states are closest to approval.

Pricing

Operator — $1,200/year. All eight modules, Hayes, the Playbook, and the credential. Foundations, email and client comms, document drafting, meeting and deposition prep. The four modules where the realization-rate math actually closes. Six weeks of structured curriculum, the Playbook, and the prompt library you keep using afterward.

Team — $1,400/seat/year, 5-seat minimum. Same content as Operator, plus the admin console, leaderboard, and manager reporting. Adds working-with-team, leadership communications, cross-functional, and advanced workflows — the modules a junior partner uses to operate the team underneath them rather than just their own desk. Includes the intra-firm leaderboard, manager reporting (so a managing partner can see realization gains by associate), and the Master credential that lasts as the curriculum grows quarterly.

For a 5–25 seat team purchase, the Team plan is what your CFO will green-light because the manager reporting is the audit trail.

The CFO / Managing Partner ask

If you're sponsoring a team purchase — five senior associates, a litigation group, a transactional practice — the conversation with your Managing Partner or CFO needs two things:

1. The champion one-pager. A two-page brief written for a non-AI-literate Managing Partner: the realization-rate math, the per-seat ROI, the comparison against Harvey and Copilot, and the language firms have used to budget the course.
2. The ROI worksheet. A spreadsheet with editable inputs for your firm's blended rate, realization rate, and target seats. Conservative defaults produce a per-seat gain of roughly $60K against a $1,200 license — a 50× return — but the worksheet lets you swap your firm's actual numbers in.

If you want to walk a Managing Partner through this live, book a call. We've done the conversation enough times to make it efficient.

What you get on day one

The morning you sign up:

• Access to the course platform with Modules 1–2 live and the remaining modules releasing on the published cadence.
• The Playbook, pre-loaded with the four canonical lawyer prompts (research-memo-three-pass, document-triage, redline-with-rationale, client-update-template) so you have a working system before you've finished your first lesson.
• Redaction guidance specific to attorney work product, NDA-protected material, and PII.
• The triage practice tool, with a confidentiality preflight built in. You can run a real (redacted) batch of email through it the first afternoon.
• For Team plan buyers — leaderboard onboarding for your team and the manager-reporting console provisioned for the partner sponsoring the purchase.

By Friday of week one, you have a working email triage prompt running on your real inbox and a research-memo prompt drafted against your most recent matter. By Friday of week three, the realization-rate math has started moving.

Ready to begin?

The course is built for the lawyer who's tired of being told AI is “transformational” and wants to know what to type into the box on Monday morning. The first three weeks are the difference between a tool you tried once and a workflow you run.