Summary
In this special Legal Week edition of 2030 Vision, co-hosts Jen Leonard and Bridget McCormack reunite in person to unveil a groundbreaking new online course built to help legal professionals lead through AI-driven change. Designed for law firm leaders, individual lawyers, and legal organizations of all sizes, the course offers actionable frameworks for navigating disruption with confidence and clarity.
Jen and Bridget share behind-the-scenes insights into how the course was created, what makes it different from others on the market, and why mindset—not tools—is the most powerful driver of innovation. From solo practitioners to law students, this course empowers learners to become proactive change agents in a rapidly evolving legal landscape. They also explore what it means to build a culture of curiosity, how to move beyond “innovation by press release,” and why learner-centric legal education is the key to staying competitive. With reflections on the future of law, leadership, and scalable education, this episode offers both practical takeaways and big-picture vision.
Explore the new AI course for legal professionals.
Built for law firm leaders, lawyers, and legal professionals ready to lead through AI-driven change.
Key Discussion Points
- The Future of Legal Education: Why traditional models no longer meet the moment—and how this new AI course helps close the gap.
- Tools vs. Thinking: The critical difference between using AI and adopting an AI-ready mindset.
Leadership in Disruption: Why AI change management is more about people and mindset than the technology itself. - Culture Shift in Law: How fostering curiosity, experimentation, and friendly competition can drive innovation across firms.
- Scaling Innovation: Lessons in learner-centric design and the power of democratizing legal knowledge at scale.
- Inside a Legal Transformation: What the American Arbitration Association’s journey teaches us about overcoming barriers to change.
- Top Skills for the AI Era: The five rising skills legal professionals need—and how firms can help develop them.
- Signals for Future Talent: Why certifications, AI badges, and firm-wide learning are becoming key to attracting the next generation of lawyers.
- Beyond the Course: How partnerships like PLI amplify reach—and what’s coming next for legal education and access to justice.
Transcript
Jen Leonard: Welcome back, everyone, to another edition of 2030 Vision: AI and the Future of Law. I am your co-host, Jen Leonard, founder of Creative Lawyers, and here in three dimensions with the wonderful Bridget McCormack, President and CEO of the American Arbitration Association. We're at LegalWeek! Hi, Bridget..
Bridget McCormack: Hi Jen, it's amazing to be here at LegalWeek together and to be in person together. How's your LegalWeek going so far?
Jen Leonard: So far so good, except, as you know, I was late to our recording because I got lost in a maze of AI tech vendors and could not find my way out. And you won an award last night, am I correct? The Monica Bay Women of Legal Tech Award. Congratulations!
Bridget McCormack: Thank you. It was really nice to be honored.
Jen Leonard: And then this morning we had a keynote from Rob Lowe. What did we learn? Gina Passarella – who's amazing – interviewed Rob Lowe and asked him what his advice for lawyers would be around AI. And he said, "Never say that something's beneath you. Reinvent the form." So he's hosting this game show now, and he's like, back in the day no serious actor would host a game show. But we're in a new era. And he said now he got to be on after the Super Bowl because of his game show, and that's a career highlight.
Then we had the chance to present with the amazing Diana Didia and Norah Olson Bluvshtein from Fredrikson & Byron, Nora is incredible.
Bridget McCormack: She's amazing, by the way – way ahead of most of the Am Law 100 firms in what she's doing.
Jen Leonard: I mean, it sort of goes to a point we've made on other podcasts: I see so many women leaders in firms who get that this is not just a tech upgrade. And the role reshaping Nora is doing, the change leadership. She talked about this in her presentation today, and I've seen this in other contexts: when you have a person who's exceptional at what they're doing… she called it the bystander effect.
Bridget McCormack: Yeah. That was great.
Jen Leonard: Love that. I had been calling it the "you're-too-good syndrome," but I like the bystander effect. It's like the firm thinks it's all handled because Nora is on it (or some other fabulous – probably woman – is on it), and then they check out. So I thought…
Bridget McCormack: Right. Which doesn't work for a general-purpose technology, like we've said a million times.
Jen Leonard: But as we do on every episode – live or virtual – we have a couple of segments to help our audience connect the dots between what's happening in the broader tech landscape, the experiments we're running in our professional and personal lives, and what they're doing day to day. We have our "AI aha" segment always, a moment when each of us has used AI for something we find interesting or delightful. Then we added our "What Just Happened" segment, which looks at what's happening in the broader world (since it's hard enough to keep track of legal tech) that might have implications down the road for lawyers.
AI Aha! Moments: From Wi-Fi Woes to Plot Holes—Can ChatGPT Do It All?
Jen Leonard: So let's start with our AI aha for this week. Bridget, what was your AI aha?
Bridget McCormack: Yeah, this one might be boring, but it's a reminder of all the ways in which this tech makes a difference in my life. So I needed to extend my Wi‑Fi out to my garage. We have a furnished room above the garage that's going to be my office. Our kids kind of grew up in it – it had video games and a ping pong table – and even though they're full-on adults, it still looked like that. My husband and I were finally like, hey, maybe we can get rid of the video games and the ping pong table.
So we painted it and carpeted it and we're going to make it my office. But the Wi‑Fi was, you know, in and out when you get to the detached garage. And so I had to extend the Wi‑Fi, and the system I have is the Eero system. It was a great system when I installed it in my house… OK, I didn't install it myself (and my story is going somewhere).
When I got that system, I had my friend who's much more techie than me – he lived in town – I was like, "Hey Steve, can you come help me with Wi‑Fi?" He's like, "Yep, this is what we're going to buy." We went to Best Buy, we bought it, he installed it. He set up the router and then the extenders. And I was like, oh God, am I going to have to bother Steve again to come extend my Wi‑Fi to my garage? I felt a little bad about it. And I was like, well, why am I starting with Steve when I now have ChatGPT, who's better to me than— I love you, Steve.
And so I went to ChatGPT and of course ChatGPT asked me all the right questions. It literally gave me, like, "These are the different ways you can go. Here are the benefits of each one. Do you have follow-up questions? Do you want me to make a recommendation?" It was like having a Geek Squad that was really kind. And I figured out exactly what I needed.
All right. What was yours? What was your AI Aha!?
Jen Leonard: Usually my AI Aha! is something where I find the AI really impressive and it astounds me. But in this case, it made me feel better about my own limitations. I have been using ChatGPT to try to figure out what's happening on Severance Season 2 and ChatGPT totally doesn't get what's going on in Severance, so it was comforting to see that even the AI was confused. So that was my AI Aha.
What Just Happened: Claude Connects to the Internet (Finally!)
Jen Leonard: And now we have a new segment, "What Just Happened," about what’s been happening in the broader tech landscape. So, Bridget, what just happened?
Bridget McCormack: One thing that happened is we got an announcement from Claude that Claude is now connected to the internet – which is something that those of us who are Claude fans (which you and I both are) have been eager to see happen for some time, and it finally did.
At this point it’s kind of like table stakes – they had to do it to stay competitive with the other frontier models – but they finally have. I think I told you earlier, I've been using ChatGPT 4.5 more and more for writing, and I used to use Claude for writing a lot more. So I don't know if they're just catching up or still not quite catching up. I'll have to play with it a little bit more. Have you had much experience with it?
Jen Leonard: I haven’t – I toggled it on (which you have to do, unlike ChatGPT) and I asked it a couple of questions, but I really didn't spend a lot of time on it.
The Ethan Mollick review was sort of, if you've used ChatGPT's Deep Research (which you and I both love), then this will be disappointing because it is sort of… going backward. I've been surprised. I've seen interviews with Dario Amodei – who's the lead at Anthropic, which makes Claude – where he says they know it's a limitation. But it seems so obvious to me that it's a limitation; it seems like it should be fairly easily fixed.
So I don't know long term… I also use Claude for writing all the time. But maybe I need to switch over to 4.5 if it's better.
Bridget McCormack: I don't know – I still love Claude. I mean, I still have Claude open all the time, but I've just found 4.5 to be a little better, a more creative writer than the earlier versions were. So I end up staying in it, because I use Deep Research and I use OpenAI for so many things that if they can keep me there for writing, I'm less likely to go over to Claude. But as you know, I like to do the same thing in a few different models just to see how they all do.
Jen Leonard: Same. I do that, and then sometimes I'll take the results and plug them both into one model and ask it to orchestrate them – or harmonize them, I should say. I do that frequently. I don't have a preferred platform; sometimes I do it with Claude, sometimes with ChatGPT. I just don't know how Claude competes long-term with ChatGPT if they're not even at the Deep Research stage. We both listened to the Hard Fork podcast from The New York Times, and there was an episode where Casey talked about enjoying Claude as a therapist because it feels like it's more closed off – which I can see, because I too use Claude as my therapist (as you know).
Bridget McCormack: Yes.
Jen Leonard: OK, so that's what just happened. Not a ton of implications for lawyers yet, other than the continued sort of supremacy of Deep Research in our lives for getting information.
Main Topic: Scaling Legal Innovation: The Human Side of AI Change Management
Jen Leonard: So onto our main topic for today – which is exciting, and one of the reasons we're here at LegalWeek. During our presentation this morning, we had the chance to unveil a project that our team has been working on with your team.
And that project is an online course that law firm leaders or individuals at firms – like, say you're at a firm that's done nothing around AI (which is not uncommon these days) and you'd like to do something – you can take an online course that tracks the roadmap that you and your colleagues have used to transform the way the AAA thinks about its business. It's online, six modules, about 30 minutes each.
And then there are quizzes you can take to earn a badge that you can put on LinkedIn to share with future employers and colleagues. (LinkedIn noted that AI literacy was the number one skill on the rise this year – pretty cool.) And we established during our panel presentation that you have ticked off all five of the top five rising skills in your work.
Bridget McCormack: Right there! The second one is conflict management, third is adaptability, fourth is public speaking… what's five?
Jen Leonard: I think creative problem solving— bing, bing, bing, bing, bing! —down the list. Totally. So people should be following what you and your colleagues are doing. And now they can. We met with about a dozen of your team members and spent weeks learning what you all were doing over at the AAA that makes you so effective and so far ahead of everybody.
Bridget McCormack: It's less mysterious than Severance – we have no severed floor!
Jen Leonard: The work is mysterious and important – it definitely is – but you are definitely much less mysterious and I want to share it. And so, you know my colleague Mariel, of course – and you also know that I love a whiteboard.
So Mariel and I spent weeks with whiteboards, unpacking everything we learned from your amazing team, and then we repackaged it into this curriculum. It includes everything from a primer on Gen AI and why it matters for law firm business models to how you nourish a culture of innovation, how you select and pilot AI projects, how you solve for the innovator's dilemma, and then how, as a leader, you orchestrate all of this together. And so we unveiled that this morning.
People can sign up to take the class at (I think) AAAICourse.org – and there's a LegalWeek discount for the first 30 days.
Bridget McCormack: And if you are a PLI Privileged Member, you will have access to it at no cost through PLI. Second exciting announcement today (in addition to launching the course): we announced a brand new joint venture with PLI – first around this course to distribute the content.
Sharon Crane, who's the CEO at PLI, is a rock star, and it's been an amazing opportunity to work with Sharon and you at the same time. I feel like this is as good as it gets.
Sharon reports – kind of like LinkedIn – that AI content is the top request PLI gets. So they are looking for more content like this. And just one follow-up on how great it was to have you working with us… I mean, as you know, we've been going a million miles a minute and getting an awful lot done in a pretty short period of time. But one thing we don't have time for is to stop and think about how we did it – what's the framework, how can others benefit from it? And that's like your superpower.
You literally listen and you're like, "Yeah, you're using this framework," and you actually can make sense of it and translate it to a bigger world. Which is amazing, because you and I have been talking to legal audiences a lot over the last year. And we've gotten this question many, many times – they've said, "Can you come help us?" You know, I've had many people say, "Can you come to my firm and help us figure out how to do this?" And I'm kind of like, I have this other full-time job… so I can't really – there's only one of me. So having you be able to put the context around it and make it available to everybody is super exciting.
Jen Leonard: Thank you so much. It's what I love to do – and it's what Mariel and I love to do.
Bridget McCormack: Yeah, Mariel's amazing too.
Jen Leonard: Mariel's incredible. She's probably blushing 7,000 shades of red that I even mentioned her name. She is incredible. And Mariel designed all these great worksheets too – they're downloadable, fillable PDFs. She's very particular about that; she's like, "Make sure they're fillable PDFs. We have to make sure people can type into them."
But the goal really is, like you said, we've been struggling – including in co-teaching law students – like, how do we move beyond sitting in a room with 16 people, right? With you flying in from Detroit once a week to do this. And it felt so good today to finally have something to hand to people and say, "You can also take these worksheets. Your situation is going to be different from Bridget’s and her team's, so how do you adapt this to what you're doing?" And like you said, I was just at the Philadelphia Bar Association a couple of weeks ago, and solo and small practices are really struggling because there's nobody there to guide them. It's nice to finally be able to say, "Here's a toolkit that you can use."
And if you want additional help, you can hire somebody or bring somebody onto your team. But it was really cool to get to unveil it today – and your whole team was there (many of them were there), which was really cool. So we thought maybe today we could spend a little time asking you – in a little mini interview – about what makes this course so special, what market it's serving… that kind of thing. So if you're game, let's do it. Got a few questions for you. OK, so why create this course? I mean, we sort of just…
Bridget McCormack: Yeah, in addition to what we just said, it's a way to scale us. You know – you and I – the talk that we give, we can only give it to a certain number of people a certain number of times a week. And then eventually we need some other ways to, like…
The idea of being able to scale it to the legal profession is what I'm interested in. As you know, I'm a big optimist about some of the long-standing problems that I feel like smart lawyers – with this technology as a teammate – can really solve now, but only if we get everybody on board and everybody is in the game. And I do think, like we've said before, we are now at a place where everybody has resigned themselves to the fact that it is coming.
But I want them to be more than resolved – I want them to be in the conversation and in the building process. And so it's a way to do that. I mean, you mentioned law firm leaders or even individual lawyers at firms that maybe haven't had a head start (and certainly some of them in big markets and smaller markets and solo practices – it's much harder for them).
But I'm also thinking about if you're a law student or a lawyer who's interviewing at a different firm or place – it's great content to take into a potential new employer. It can give you a sophistication around what change management looks like with a disruption that is a general-purpose technology like this one, and a framework for how to think about it and how to be a leader in a legal organization around change management. And that's kind of what the course is – it's not about particular tech solutions.
I mean, you know that my team has partnered with many of the AI companies out there, and we're building our own point solutions and AI-native products on OpenAI's technology. We're a Microsoft shop, so that's what we build with – but we are agnostic in this course about what tech platform you should use. This is about the human part of change management. That's the story that we're telling.
Jen Leonard: I had to laugh this morning when you said it was tool-agnostic, because (I'm going to mention Mariel again) she bought me, for Christmas, a hat that says "tool agnostic" – because we say it so many times to our clients. That's what we really care about as well – the tech is going to be the tech. It's going to figure itself out… not figure itself out, but you know, it's an easier solve than the human piece, right?
Bridget McCormack: 100%. Yeah – it's easier even to learn. The tech is much easier to learn than the change-management piece, I think.
Jen Leonard: Yeah, and it was interesting – when you were just talking about bringing this to a new firm, I was also thinking: a lot of firms right now are doing what I call "innovation by press release" (trying to make it look like… well, not all – to be fair, some of them are doing real things, and even the ones doing that are at least thinking about it). But it seems like it could be a good tool to attract people to their firm. For example, they could say, "Hey, we are all taking this course. We're all earning these badges – we're all thinking about this at every level."
The AI show that we listen to – the other podcast – I've heard Paul Roetzer talk about: if you're a young person (not even a young person – just a person) looking for a job, you should not be going to an organization that doesn't have an AI strategy or isn't actively thinking about what its AI-shaped future looks like.
Bridget McCormack: I know – it's one of the things I tell law students when I talk to them. I really think it should matter in your selection of where you go, because you need a career two years from now, and five years from now, and ten years from now. Actually, it's a really exciting time to be graduating from law school – but a time when you want to be a little discerning about what the organization's strategy is around this technology.
Jen Leonard: And to put a really fine point on it – and connect it with optimism – I worked for a very long time supporting law students and thinking through which firm they were going to go to, essentially. And they all looked exactly the same to them. In many ways, they were very much the same. And this moment just feels like this rare opportunity for firms to differentiate themselves. If I were the leader of a firm, this would be priority one: make sure that our future lawyers know that we take this seriously and are reshaping our legal services.
So there's a lot of AI courses out there – a lot of AI courses for lawyers. We did a lot of background research when we worked with you to find all of them. There are many. So what makes this course different from the other ones on the market?
Bridget McCormack: I mean, maybe you've seen others that I'm not aware of – but I've reviewed your research (and if you have seen others, you kept it from me!). No, I think one important difference is we're telling the real story about a successful legacy legal organization that has all of the same barriers that every other successful legal organization has (which lots of law firms have) – and how in this real-world experience we pushed through a lot of those barriers. I mean, nothing kills innovation like success. The AAA has been very successful for a very long time.
Innovation is hard for lawyers. (We're not all lawyers at the AAA, but a lot of us are – and even those of us who are not still serve lawyers.) So we have a very legal-centric culture – which we need to, because those are the people who use our services. And change management is especially hard in legal (you've heard me say that a million times) for lots of good reasons. I mean, they're cultural in part, but they're also normative in important ways – like, lawyers are supposed to be the risk managers and the slow movers in the room. That's just hard when it comes to disruptive technology and figuring out how to adapt to it.
And I do think the fact that the course itself is centered on the learner – and gives you an opportunity to build it for your practice or your firm or your organization – makes it unique. But I hope people enjoy hearing from my different team members. (And you've heard me also say this a million times.) I think this is a moment where you absolutely cannot trust the change management to your engineering team, even though it is a tech disruption – it has to be every member of your team, everybody in. And you'll see from my team that that's been our approach. Some of your best ideas are gonna come from people who are not engineers – though there's so much fun for the engineers to have right now, too.
Jen Leonard: And the learner-centricity piece was the part that really excited us about working with all of you. In the research that we did on other courses – and there are good courses out there too – a lot of them are sort of either sage on the stage (just information delivery) or like a panel discussion among people talking about it. Nothing wrong with panel discussions, but we really wanted this to be actionable, practical, and learner-centric. What do you think are the most important lessons that learners will take out of the course?
Bridget McCormack: In some ways, even though the content is AI – and AI is the reason for what we've done over the last two years – there's going to be some other disruption facing lawyers (who happen to be in the middle of geopolitical change). And I think the most important lesson is one that's going to be transferable to the next disruption, which is that you can really create a culture of innovation and adaptability and creativity and a bias toward action that just puts you in a really great spot – not just to be competitive vis-à-vis your peers, but actually to build a practice that your clients really appreciate, but also one that you do too.
I hope one of the lessons that comes through is how much more fun it is to have a "what if we could" approach to the future than a "why we can't". So I do think it's this change-management toolkit that's the most important piece of it. But I don't know – you might have other ideas.
Jen Leonard: I totally agree on all that. One of the things (and we talked about it this morning – we talk about it constantly) is that leadership is so key. Again, the tech is not the hardest part, but it really is a mindset shift. And what we got from interviewing your team – it came up again and again – was this idea that at first people were afraid or nervous or unsure how to use it. And once you said, "We could do all sorts of things we could never do before," and you started doing it, they all talked about this friendly competition that emerged.
Not only were they testing things, but they were like, "I want to be the first one to tell Bridget about this," or to tell my peers about this. And that's what I hope leaders take away from this – you don't need to be a technologist, you don't need to have the best subscription to whatever leading tech platform there is. The much more important thing is to have a mindset around experimentation and learning and growth (within safe confines, which we talk about in the course).
That was my biggest takeaway – and just how much fun it must be to be part of your team, because they were all like, "I just can't wait to tell Bridget about new things." And you could see it today – they are having fun and really should be proud of all the work that they're doing.
So we talked about the PLI partnership a little bit. That, to me, just seems like a great example of innovation in action. The three of us had worked together in different contexts and it's like, we want to broaden the reach of this course. And PLI is the leading educator of lawyers, so it seemed like a no-brainer.
I just have to circle back on that and say – while we were talking about this, I think Sharon Crane was in a Jeep in the jungles of Costa Rica trying to get to her plane, and you were in California around some dogs in a backyard. It was just a great image of women getting stuff done.
Bridget McCormack: I said that – I'm like, "Yep… we don't let geography or transportation or animals stop us." And we were like, "Yeah, we can get this interview done." We were literally doing an interview with Bob Ambrogi from various places.
Jen Leonard: That was amazing. I always say being a working woman is kind of like living in a video game – it just gets harder and harder all the time. So I felt a little bit like we were in Donkey Kong or something. That's all I have to say about that one. I guess just, do you see other courses on the horizon now that you've gone through this process once?
Bridget McCormack: I do. You know, again, because it's such a better way to scale knowledge transfer, I don't see why we wouldn't figure out how to build additional courses. I mean, we're already doing some new things at the AAA that I can't wait to show the world.
So I could imagine follow-on modules for great experiments we've been running that have taught us a lot about moving your workforce and rebuilding your teams. In addition to that, this particular course I think would be really interesting to do for in-house teams, courts, legal aid organizations…
I would love to think about the different ways we could build a course that would be a little bit more targeted towards different audiences. I think PLI is just a great partner to think about what that looks like with. So I'm super excited. In addition to all the ways in which the business of law and the operating system of law will change for the better in the coming years, I do think there's opportunity for education – if you have some runway – to do some innovative things.
Like, I feel really lucky that we do, and PLI does. It's hard if you're a tenured member of a faculty at a law school – semesters start in September and end in November, and everything has to be 14 weeks and either two credits or four credits. And you have all these constraints.
I love that we can build whatever, in whatever format, and then distribute it and give it to people in ways that make a lot more sense with the way people need content now. So I do think education for lawyers – in addition to the business of law and the practice of law – is a big open frontier, and you know the AAA has an educational mission. So it's exciting to be able to think about the ways we can stretch in that way. (I know you've been thinking about this for a long time.)
Jen Leonard: Well, just to education generally – I just think it is not designed to meet the moment, and hasn't been for a very long time. And so it was so much fun to work on a project where we could actually roll up your sleeves and think, "Things are changing really quickly. How would you design something to get it in the hands of people as quickly as possible, in a way that they can use it however they want?"
It’s almost like general-purpose education in a way, right? How do you make that useful for them? And who knows how far we go with these types of projects – but I feel like there are lessons to be learned for education more broadly.
(This is going down a whole other rabbit hole, but…) we're at this moment where a lot of these institutions are under tremendous stress. One of the silver linings of that, I hope, is that some innovative models will emerge – and that the world will be more receptive to them as an old world order is sort of eroding over time.
Bridget McCormack: I had this line in the pandemic that went viral. I said it was not the disruption we wanted, but it was the disruption we needed – because it took a significant disruption for courts to figure out that we could reach our users much more effectively in a way that made more sense for them and their jobs and their families. And then that allowed us to try a whole bunch of new things. And I do feel like education will benefit from some of this experimentation and innovation that's going to be needed, given the rocky road ahead.
Jen Leonard: And I love the idea of creating modules for legal aid organizations and public-interest lawyers as well. I would say a lot of the skepticism I get in presentations comes from public-interest lawyers – understandably – and their pushback is sort of that they're dealing with the most precious parts of people's lives (whether that's housing or their family members). I just think having somebody like you, with your background, is the perfect answer to that.
Because it's precisely those kinds of situations where we want you to be with your clients, and we want all the rest to sort of be augmented through AI, right? So that will be our next project to do. Anything else you wanted to share about the course before we say goodbye?
Bridget McCormack: Check it out at AAAICourse.org.
Jen Leonard: Well, this has been a great episode – super excited about the launch of the course and looking forward to more in the future. Thank you so much for listening to us, and we'll see you on the next episode of 2030 Vision: AI and the Future of Law.