The AI Skill Stack for Lawyers

AI 301 is where we direct AI like associates. Very few people teach it.

Lawyers aren’t falling behind on AI for lack of drive. We’re falling behind because our AI training almost always stops at prompting.

Yes, prompting matters. But it’s the starting line, not the finish.

The real skill is directing AI like you direct your associates.

You train associates to fit how you practice: your standards, your style of client service, your way of working.

Do the same with AI, and you have an edge that most lawyers don’t.

The AI Skill Stack

Let’s stick with the associate metaphor.

AI 101 is when we treat our associate like an eager intern. They’re smart and responsive. They draft well, research quickly and handle most of what you throw at them.

But they forget a lot between conversations (not everything, but enough that you notice). They sometimes assert things that aren’t quite right. And when you hand them too much material at once, they mix things up.

AI 201 is when the associate becomes a solid junior. You’re more confident about the work product, although still on simple tasks. You bounce ideas off them before a negotiation. They even start preparing decks for you.

The associate hasn’t changed. You’ve just gotten better at directing them. You scope questions tighter, break big tasks into smaller ones and learn which assignments to trust and which to double-check.

AI 301 is when the associate goes from just taking orders to being an active working partner.

You’ve seen this light-bulb moment when promising junior lawyers step up as mid-levels or senior associates.

You’re delegating tasks to them now. You trust they’re managing their work well. They sometimes surprise you with polish and insight. They match your working style and habits. You shift more work their way.

You give them real feedback. You invest in their training.

Like rising star associates, you come to depend on them as go-to experts on a project.

They start coming back to you with ideas: “What if we ran this matter differently?” “How about we change this process?” You buy in. You build out a system together, impressed at their initiative.

You see them in action: planning logistics, strategizing, running complex analyses, managing up to clients and senior lawyers, showing client bedside manner.

They’re not just building decks anymore. They’re figuring out how to pitch your client in the first place.

You start thinking this person has staying power. You treat them as a confidant.

AI 401 is the associate who works overnight and shows up ready every morning. They’re thinking deeply about your matters on their own.

They come back with plans to improve things, not small fixes but insightful changes at scale.

They build you a new standard form template that you’d otherwise piece together manually over years. They run a new process for preparing citations, researching precedent and drafting briefs.

They even coordinate other junior associates.

You let them manage big chunks of matters, checking the final work product and output.

This is the horizon, and AI 301 is the foundation that gets you there.

Each layer in the AI skill stack builds the instinct for the next. And each bootcamp session builds toward the one above it.

What AI 301 Covers: Terminal Foundations

I’ve written about why the terminal is the best way to build AI intuition.

This is the instinct to direct thinking machines, orchestrating digital agents who can generate real knowledge work.

The skills you build in AI 301 (working in the terminal, managing context, writing instructions) are the foundation every level above depends on. The bootcamp puts you there hands-on.

Once you’re working with raw AI power, you see what’s possible. Claude Code can string together complex tasks in a single prompt: search the internet for sources, pull in precedents from the cloud drive, run a risk analysis against your checklist and draft a summary memo for your client. You can customize it to match how you work: your preferences, your shortcuts, your workflows.

In AI 301 we start with the foundations: navigating the terminal, understanding how AI memory works and learning the basics of customization. But even the basics change how you think about what AI can do for you.

Your instructions file

The first real thing you’ll build is a file called Claude.md.

You customize the associate’s personality, their communication style, how they work and how it fits you. You set the tone for their legal work, whether deep and rigorous versus high-level and directional.

You give them context about who you are and your priorities so they know how best to help.

Most lawyers talk to AI cold every time. No memory, no preferences. Claude.md changes that. You write your preferences once in plain English, and every conversation after starts from your baseline.

And you refine this file over time, like with an associate, building up that working relationship.

A concrete example: you ask Claude Code, “What are the best writing guidelines for a lawyer?” It gives you a solid answer. You tell it to save that to your Claude.md. One minute, and now every draft follows those guidelines without being asked.

Note: OpenAI’s Codex calls it Agents.md. Gemini calls it Gemini.md. OpenClaw calls it Soul.md. Same idea.

Plan, build, adjust, fix

In AI 301 you build a very simple app, something small and even a little silly. But the app isn’t the point. The thinking process is.

You tell Claude Code to plan before it builds. It asks clarifying questions, helping you brainstorm. It maps out the steps. Then it builds, and things break. (They’ll for sure break. That’s almost the point.)

You then watch an AI debug its own mistakes in real time. You adjust, it adjusts.

Plan, build, adjust, fix. That cycle is the microcosm of every AI interaction you’ll ever have. Once you see it, you stop thinking about AI as a chatbot and start thinking about it as a thinking machine you direct.

Looking Ahead: What’s After AI 301

Future bootcamps build on this foundation.

In AI 302, you upgrade the associate’s toolkit. You build custom commands in plain English that automate tasks you’d repeat manually. You connect AI to the services where you actually work: your chats, your calendar, your documents, your tools.

In AI 303, you build a Second Brain. Your associate stops forgetting between conversations and starts managing your workflow alongside you: triaging messy thoughts into tasks, surfacing what you’ve been neglecting, becoming a partner instead of a tool.

This is how you build AI intuition.

Hands-on Learning

My AI bootcamps are free and exclusive to subscribers. I run the same material multiple times so you can pick a time.

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See you in AI 301.