What Does It Mean to Be an AI-Ready Lawyer? PLI’s AI Competency Framework Explained

In this episode of AI and the Future of Law, Jen Leonard and Bridget McCormack are joined by Farrah Pepper, legal innovation partner at Harvey, and Kirsten Talmage, chief strategy officer at Practising Law Institute, to discuss PLI’s AI competency framework and its role in helping the legal profession build a shared understanding of AI fluency.

The conversation how PLI developed the AI competency framework, why a common language around AI readiness matters, and how lawyers can use AI while preserving the judgment, oversight, ethics, and professional responsibility that remain central to legal practice. Farrah and Kirsten also discuss how law firms, legal departments, law schools, students, and smaller teams can use the framework to assess strengths, identify gaps, and build practical AI skills over time.

Key Takeaways

●      AI competency requires a shared language: The framework is designed to help the legal profession define what AI fluency means across different roles and practice settings.

●      AI training should not be tool-specific: The framework focuses on durable skills that can evolve as AI tools and use cases continue to change.

●      Human judgment remains essential: AI can enhance legal work, but lawyers must still evaluate outputs, identify risks, and apply their professional judgment.

●      The framework can guide organizational training: Law firms and legal departments can use it to audit existing programs, identify gaps, and prioritize future learning.

●      Smaller teams may benefit significantly: Resource-constrained legal teams can use the framework as a practical roadmap for building AI readiness.

●      Law students can use it as a career tool: Students and prospective students can use the framework to evaluate schools, employers, and their own readiness for legal work in the AI era.

Final Thoughts

This episode offers a practical look at how the legal profession can move from AI experimentation to AI competence. Farrah Pepper and Kirsten Talmage explain why lawyers do not need to become technologists, but they do need to understand how AI works, where it fits into legal workflows, and how to use it responsibly. PLI’s AI competency framework provides a shared starting point for that work — one that can evolve alongside the technology and the profession.

Transcript

Intro + AI Aha!

Jen Leonard: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the AI and the Future of Law podcast, the podcast where we explore all of the fascinating dimensions and changes happening in the world of artificial intelligence and discuss what they might mean for the legal profession.

I’m your co-host, Jen Leonard, founder of Creative Lawyers, here as always with the wonderful Bridget McCormack, president and CEO of the American Arbitration Association.

And we are delighted today to be joined by two fantastic guests: Farrah Pepper, who is legal innovation partner with Harvey, and Kirsten Talmage, who’s chief strategy officer with Practising Law Institute.

Welcome to the pod, both of you.

Farrah Pepper: Thanks for having us.

Jen Leonard: Absolutely.

And we are going to learn all about the AI competency framework that PLI recently released, and which Farrah, Kirsten, and myself had a role in working on.

But before we dive in, in every episode we ask our guests to share their AI Aha! — what they’re using AI for in their personal or professional life that they find particularly interesting.

So I’m going to kick it to you, Farrah, to share your AI Aha! to get us started.

Farrah Pepper: Well, here is my Aha! And I think it’s kind of a small one, which is sort of the point.

I do a fair amount of presentations and talks and get to go to a good number of events, which I love doing. I take very seriously that if I’m a presenter, I want it to have my voice. I want it to be material that is interesting, that gives people some sort of ROI nugget.

So I have my own way of putting together materials, and it takes a while — at least in the before days, it did.

And so my Aha! has been leveraging generative AI as a thought partner and as a style designer, so that as I go into different sessions, I can do the part that I love, which is thinking through what I want to convey and how I want to do it, and have this partner who will basically take things like slide formats and do a lot of the messy work to shape my ideas.

And then once I put together something that I feel good about initially, which takes a fraction of the time that it used to as a cumbersome human working alone, I then also use it as a sparring partner to try to think about what might be the hardest or most interesting questions I would get, and to be ready for that.

So I’ve basically turned generative AI into my prep partner for things I have to do.

Jen Leonard: Very cool. I love that.

And definitely, I know Bridget and I both see a compression of time using AI to get ready for things like that. Right, Bridget?

Bridget McCormack: It’s definitely part of my day-to-day workflow now. If someone told me they had to take it away from me, I think I would find a new career maybe. I don’t know.

Farrah Pepper: I don’t want to find out either.

And I guess that’s the nature of progress, right? We can’t imagine the world before this innovation came about.

Jen Leonard: Very cool, Farrah.

And Kirsten, coming to you, what are you using AI for these days?

Kirsten Talmage: Yeah. So, taking Farrah’s example and putting it on the macro level, if you will, my team has been working with our content division to streamline the way in which we create our programs.

So I think many people are familiar with PLI’s multi-hour to multi-day programs. They actually are quite lengthy to produce. It takes about a six- to nine-month planning period to plan these programs.

And so we’ve been building orchestrated agents that actually reduce that program time substantially, so that we can now go to a speaker. For instance, if Farrah was speaking on one of our programs, we could go to Farrah ahead of time and say, “Look, we have all of these assets already produced for you. Look through them, review them, put them in your own words.”

But we’ve done a lot of that work that would take the constant back-and-forth over the six- to nine-month period. We’ve reduced the actual time to create those assets to 15 minutes to an hour, and it gets us off to a running start.

And I should say this is in the experimentation phase still, but it’s been very interesting to build these agents that can really do a lot of this work for us and take a lot of the burden off of our speakers, who are all volunteers.

Bridget McCormack: That’s really cool, because it’s not only saving yourself six to nine months. It allows you to totally rethink how you go about recruiting speakers and even programs, is my guess, right?

You’ve opened a lot of room for creativity that probably was cramped when you had that long planning timeline. That’s awesome.

Kirsten Talmage: That’s exactly it.

And it allows us to use our human experts to the highest of their capabilities. So it removes that rote work as well.

Bridget McCormack: I bet it’s easier for speakers to say yes as well when you come to them with that.

Kirsten Talmage: We hope so. We’re still in the experimentation phase. But yes, I think so, because a lot of the time when we have speakers who can’t participate in a program, it’s oftentimes because they can’t fit that timeline into their schedule.

Farrah Pepper: Now, Kirsten, I’m so into what you’re talking about, and I love that we’re already kindred spirits. I shouldn’t be surprised.

But as someone who has, over the years, spoken on my share of PLI programs as a volunteer, I could not be more jazzed to hear this is the direction you’re going, because it is actually a commitment of time and resources. And I expect that this is going to make everyone so happy.

Jen Leonard: I love it. We’ve already created and produced innovation already. We’re not even through AI Aha!s.

Bridget, this conversation is making me think of when we were teaching a class together in law school about AI, and how difficult it could be because every time we got together to plan for a fall class six months away, we just gave up because everything would be different by then.

Bridget McCormack: It’s impossible.

I feel the same way with ABA panels. ABA panels want you to give them the slides 18 months before the panel. And when you’re someone who speaks about AI, I just can’t do that.

So you’re going to have to find somebody else who is dumb enough to give you slides 18 months before I’m speaking.

Jen Leonard: Yeah, they’re like, “This exciting new development called ChatGPT…”

Well, I love those AI Ahas. They’re very cool, and they will make all the work that we do better in so many ways. As you both said, it elevates our ability to add the human element to it.

Building a Shared Language for AI Competency

Jen Leonard: And so today, we’re really excited to have you talk about our main topic, which is how do we build those skills and emphasize those human skills in a changing world, and get some clarity on what actually goes into being competent in the AI era.

We’re going to talk about an AI competency framework that PLI has released, and it’s the result of coordination across experts from across the profession.

But Kirsten, we would love to start with you and hear a little bit about that origin story and what the AI competency framework actually is.

Kirsten Talmage: Sure. So, to go into its creation a little bit, it was a very intentional collaboration among three different groups.

We have PLI’s Innovation Council, which Farrah is a member of and Jen, you chair. It’s comprised of experts in the field of innovation in the legal industry.

Then there was a second group, the Professional Development Consortium and their board, and the third group being Creative Lawyers.

These three entities came together based on a workshop that was held in the late fall of 2025. We sat down with the board of the PDC and asked them really what was on their mind and what we could help with — just a very blue-sky conversation.

And the one thing that resonated throughout that group was a lack of a shared understanding of what AI competency or AI fluency means, not just for individual attorneys but also for law firms.

What they were seeing was that attorneys would go from one firm to another with very different understandings of what it meant to have competency in AI.

So, based on that, we decided to bring these three groups together. We had a series of workshops and sessions, and we iterated off of what the feedback was. We really evolved this competency framework to be something that could be applied whether you were in a law school setting, a law firm setting, or a legal group within an organization, so that it could be this shared language about what having AI fluency really means.

In the end, what it is is a framework that has five pillars. It has 20 competencies under each of those pillars, and it has three levels of proficiency.

And when we were making it, we very intentionally did not attach a certification to it. There’s no linearity. You can be fluent in one of the pillars and lacking fluency in another.

It’s really so that you can take it — or a PD person could take it — and apply it to their group of attorneys or to their firm, and understand where you are in each of the pillars and how to get to that next level of proficiency.

Bridget McCormack: That’s so needed.

I’m really excited to learn more about it. And it feels like the time is so ripe for it because there’s so much change in the industry right now.

Farrah, you’re kind of an avatar for that. You started working on this framework when you were in-house at Marsh, right? And then you finished it now at Harvey. Those are two different jobs, I believe, although you tell me. I think you probably do different things, but they probably give you great perspective on why the framework is useful, especially now.

What does the fluidity that we’re seeing in the legal profession right now mean for the moment we’re in, and why is the framework useful?

And then, secondly, separate question: what skills do you build working at a legal tech company that are different from those you built practicing law in-house?

Farrah Pepper: I love this conversation so much.

And I’m an accidental avatar, let’s put it that way.

So yeah, I started working on this framework and joined the PLI Innovation Council last year. It wasn’t that long ago, but at the pace of change and the velocity that we’re seeing in the market, it actually is a long time ago.

A lot has happened.

When I started, I had been a longtime in-house counsel, most recently at Marsh, which is a fairly large organization that had more than 600 members in the legal and compliance team, which I was part of as chief legal innovation counsel.

So from that perspective, I joined.

And by the time I left, just a few months later, I was in my current role, which is legal innovation partner at Harvey. It is a different role, but it definitely draws upon a lot of the same skills.

And what I love about this is that I’m learning and I’m growing, and I’m seeing law firms, in-house, and tech companies not really as three different careers anymore. They’re three different vantage points, three different perspectives.

And the more you see of each of them, the better your judgment gets — just your legal judgment. That’s been my experience thus far.

I’m only four months into my Harvey role, and that role involves being a strategic advisor to Harvey’s customers who are on their AI journey, being a strategic advisor inside of Harvey, and bringing that in-house perspective.

And I also, once upon a time, spent over a decade in Big Law, so I’m bringing that to bear too.

I also get a chance to engage in things like this framework, because this is the moment for all of us as a profession to figure out how we are going to teach this, how we are going to learn this, and how we are going to shape the next generation.

Bridget McCormack: I think in some ways the framework is so useful because we don’t know what to call people anymore.

We’re hiring people now in these roles that we’re just making up titles for because they didn’t exist six months ago or a year ago. They’re straddling tech and the GC’s office in-house in my organization, so we’re just making up job titles.

I don’t know if we’re doing a good job or not, but in some ways we care more about the competencies than we do about the name of the job, right?

Farrah Pepper: That’s so dead on. My last few roles have all been made up. They were the best.

Why? Because they come from a place of need. It means something is needed that wasn’t there before. I was recently talking with a community from a law school, and we were talking about this kind of progression. People want to know what this means for the future.

And my position, which I believe heartily, is that there’s never been a more exciting or better time to be in legal, because my job that I’m in now didn’t exist five months ago, and there’s going to be plenty more that didn’t exist five months from today.

Jen Leonard: Yeah, it’s really cool.

We were talking about how I started my career in legal education as a career counselor. And ten years ago, when we would have alumni call who were thinking of making a move after only having been somewhere like two years, we would say, “Absolutely, you should not do that. It’s a major red flag if you’re bouncing around.”

Now it’s just like everybody’s bouncing around all over the place.

And Farrah, as you were talking, I was thinking about the council itself and how many changes have happened in that group, including one of our talented colleagues, Jen Reeves, who’s on the council and was drawn to Bridget’s leadership and is now part of Bridget’s team.

So I agree. I think it’s so freeing and so fun to be able to take advantage of new opportunities and not be constrained by these mindsets that you can’t do things when you really want to be doing things for old-fashioned reasons.

Why the Framework Matters and What AI Fluency Means

Jen Leonard: Kirsten, you talked a little bit about the challenge that the framework is designed to solve — this lack of shared language around AI fluency.

And Farrah, you had mentioned that there’s a parallel in our recent past as a profession in thinking through frameworks and their importance.

Would you care to share how you were reflecting on something you’d already been through that looks a lot like this?

Farrah Pepper: Absolutely. So when we were thinking about this, I’m just struck by the parallel to what was, in my career, the first big wave of tech that I experienced.

I came of age when e-discovery became a real thing, and people did not know what to do with themselves. They were used to approaching discovery in a certain way. There was no shared lingo. There were no predefined workflows. It almost sounds quaint today, because so much of that has become routinized and clear.

But that’s because the blood, sweat, and tears of a lot of fearless volunteers went into defining that and coming up with the common language and flows.

So the parallel that struck me is that this framework is very similar to the EDRM model in kindred-spirit ways, meaning they touch on completely different things. But it was an attempt by a lot of very dedicated industry experts to say, “Can we agree that there’s one way to talk about this?”

Because we can’t even have meetings or trainings or anything, because when someone says “collection” or “review,” they mean different things.

So they reduced everything onto this model, which obviously has a lot more going on, but it could be put on one page.

And to this day, any training that I will do that touches on e-discovery, the very first place you start — that very first slide — is always the EDRM model.

And so the hope and aspiration that I have for the AI Ready Lawyer framework is that it becomes what EDRM was to e-discovery: a common way of looking at things, thinking about things, and talking and teaching about things.

Bridget McCormack: It’s interesting.

Other professions do this somewhat regularly, right? It’s sort of like how the internet was built, because the companies building it couldn’t wait for the government to figure out what the shared language would be, what the shared frameworks would be.

But lawyers don’t have a history of operating that way.

So I love the idea of, let’s get in front of this and figure out how we can have a shared language and a shared understanding of what AI-ready lawyers need to know.

Is that part of the goal?

Kirsten Talmage: It’s absolutely part of the goal — to get ahead of it.

One, we wanted to make sure that it is not a static framework. It is ever-evolving as things change, as they are changing every week, it seems like at this point.

We can evolve the framework, but it is also not tool-specific. It is also not innovation-specific. So you can apply it at any point in time, but also we can evolve it. We really intentionally wanted to make it that way.

And I think the other thing is that the framework is actually teaching us, as an education company, about what we’re missing.

So the first thing we did when we finalized the framework with Creative Lawyers, the Innovation Council, and the PDC board is we applied it to our own training.

We took a look at our catalog, and we made sure that we had programs that could fulfill every area of the five pillars — and not just the five pillars, but all 20 competencies as well — and that we had a progression there so it could hit those different proficiency levels.

We found some gaps, and we’re currently producing programs to fill those gaps. But it was certainly a learning tool for us as well, even though we were involved in the creation.

So it’s been an interesting experience, and quite a good one, I think, for everyone that’s been involved and just the different perspectives and points of view coming in.

We have the PD leaders who are struggling with what AI training looks like, what innovation training looks like, and to give them a guide or a map is incredibly helpful.

But you could also, as an individual attorney, take a look at where you fall and where you need help and guidance.

Jen Leonard: We’ve been sort of focused on the big picture here and the goals of the framework.

But maybe, Kirsten, you could start us off on a Cliff Notes version of what the framework actually focuses on.

So at a high level, what are the types of skills that it’s concentrating around?

Kirsten Talmage: The first pillar is AI fluency: do you understand what the tools are? Do you understand how to use the tools?

Then the second pillar goes into application. So now that you understand these tools, can you actually apply your own workflows to these tools? Not can you use the tool in an AI-first fashion, but as an enhancement.

Because the third pillar actually goes right along with that second pillar, and that is making sure that what AI produces to enhance your work — not replace it — is actually the right thing.

So, ensuring that there aren’t any hallucinations, that there isn’t anything that wouldn’t be what you would produce as an attorney with judgment and skill. And that’s what we are ensuring is not replaced with this framework.

It is really the ability to fluently use AI.

And then, of course, there’s the governance piece that goes on top of it, and ensuring that all attorneys understand the ethical implications of using AI in their daily workflows or as a thought partner.

Bridget McCormack: Farrah, what about at Harvey?

I know Harvey Academy has its own education modules and training modules. Is there some way that those will be mapped onto the framework or aligned with the framework? What’s the thinking?

Farrah Pepper: The fact that Harvey has Harvey Academy is a microcosm of what’s going on right now and why this framework is so important.

Obviously, high-quality material is coming from many different sources. But I think when Harvey Academy was created, this didn’t exist yet.

So what I hope we see — and the spirit of this is alignment — is that a discipline-wide framework starts to exist.

The job now, I think, is translation.

Because if you get a certification inside of Harvey Academy and a proficiency level inside of the PLI framework, the idea is that’s actually describing the same growth.

And we don’t want a lawyer or a legal professional’s development to be trapped inside of any one vocabulary.

So that’s why this is so important.

I’m hoping that going forward, as materials are created, there will be that alignment so that we don’t have death by a thousand training certifications.

Using the Framework Across Firms, Legal Departments, and Smaller Teams

Jen Leonard: Definitely. And what is so cool about the framework, one of the things, is how it really is designed for any stakeholder across the profession to take and use in their domain.

So what if you’re inside a firm or a legal department and somebody passes this to you, forwards it to you, and says, “Here, figure out how we should use this in our organization.”

How would you actually execute on it?

Kirsten Talmage: Sure. I would actually recommend doing exactly what we did at PLI, which is first, an audit of your current content.

So what training content do you have for your attorneys or other professionals inside of your firm or organization that fits within the different pillars and that addresses the competencies within those pillars?

Then, where are the gaps? Where do you need to fill the holes in the framework? And then what resources are available to you to fill those holes, be it internal trainings or bringing in a consultant or a training partner that you have?

But I would really recommend going in and just first of all, taking a look at what your current training looks like, and also your organizational structure or law firm structure, I think, is really important as well.

Because if you’re sitting in an Am Law 200 firm versus a midsize firm, you’re going to have very different needs and resources available to you.

Farrah Pepper: I’ll also add, because this is something I’ve seen before.

I’ve spent years volunteering in CLOC as an organization, and one of CLOC’s major contributions is what I lovingly call the CLOC wheel. But it’s that visual of different competencies, almost in a pie.

And at first, if misinterpreted, it can be quite overwhelming because people say, “Wait, you want me to develop all 12 core competencies in legal operations simultaneously?” And they throw up their hands and they’re done.

But that’s not how it’s intended to be interpreted. It’s intended to show the range of things and give people choices.

So similarly, in this framework, there are 20 competencies. That’s a lot to tackle at once.

So I did want to stress that that’s not the intent.

It’s to show people what the end state can look like, but you have to put it through your own filter, your own priorities, where value is going to exist for your organization, where you’re weakest, where you’re strongest, and then tackle a little bit at a time.

I had a dear colleague at Marsh who, for many years before he retired, would say, “You just have to take one bite of the elephant at a time.”

So while it’s not actually an elephant, the visual is: you can’t bite off more than you can chew at once.

Bridget McCormack: PLI is the distributor of the framework. What has been the response so far? Who are you hearing from? What has the reaction been?

Kirsten Talmage: Yeah, it’s been overwhelmingly positive. Within the first week of its release, we heard from, I think it was, over 35 law firms just spanning the gamut — so Am Law 200 all the way down to smaller firms that have specializations in specific areas.

And what we’re seeing is it’s been particularly needed and in play in midsize firms, because as I alluded to earlier, they don’t have the same resources and staffing that the Am Law 200 firms have.

So even though law firms in general have a way to go in terms of AI fluency and having the standards, which this framework will certainly help proliferate, the midsize firms are basically thanking us for releasing something that can help them structure their AI and innovation training.

They don’t have a director or a chief innovation officer. They don’t have access to the same tools that the larger firms have.

And so they found this incredibly helpful as a guide and a start to assess where they are, and then what they can do with the resources they do have to set up a structure so that all of their attorneys are at least fluent in AI.

Bridget McCormack: Do you guys think it’s going to be just as useful for small firms or even solo practitioners? What’s your view on that?

Kirsten Talmage: Absolutely.

And I’ll let Farrah answer this as well, but it was intentionally designed so that me, as an individual lawyer, could go in and figure out exactly where I have gaps in my own knowledge and use of AI within my practice.

Or for somebody who is responsible for the training or who heads innovation at a firm to take it and overlay it on top of the firm, to assess weaknesses and strengths and see where they perhaps need to spend more of their time with their attorneys.

So both.

Farrah Pepper: And I’ll second that and say I’ve been very focused on the in-house experience since I joined Harvey, working with different teams of different sizes.

And one thing that’s interesting to me is that smaller teams can actually benefit from AI more because they are so resource-constrained, and similarly, may actually benefit more from this framework because it is the rare large legal department that actually has in-house training, development, and learning resources.

In most in-house teams, at best, you have some resources that are company-wide who occasionally try to customize things for legal audiences.

But most often, in-house teams of every size are relying heavily on law firms and groups like PLI to give them the education that they need.

So this is an incredibly potent tool that is being handed for free to the community to leverage as everybody is trying to get to that same level of AI fluency and competency.

Law Students, AI Readiness & Assessment

Jen Leonard: So we’ve been talking about how practicing lawyers can be using the framework, but they’re not the only group that we were thinking about in designing this.

And I actually have to confess that when I was thinking about legal educators, I really was thinking about law professors who are trying to modernize their curricula.

But it occurred to me, as we were prepping for this podcast, that if you’re a law student or you’re somebody who’s thinking about going to law school, there are actually ways that you can be using this framework to make the most out of your educational experience.

So maybe, Farrah, we’ll stay with you for a second and ask: what do you think about law students and prospective law students, and how they could use the framework?

Farrah Pepper: Yeah, I love this one because I kind of put myself in my little time machine and thought back to when I was in law school.

What not everyone knows is that, just like back in the day you would get a Westlaw or Lexis license so you could do research, a lot of students are getting exposed very early on to generative AI.

Harvey has a law school program. Other companies have law school programs. And so students have these tools in their hands.

If I had the power like that back then, I probably would have used it for any number of things.

One that immediately springs to mind is thinking about future employers and doing an assessment of what people say they do in terms of leveraging AI, and comparing that to what they’re actually doing — whether the talk and the walk meet as you’re selecting where you want to spend your future.

And then there’s also just a lot that I would probably deploy it on as I was doing things as simple as picking my course schedule and figuring out what my daily life would look like.

So it’s just incredible to me, like we were talking about right at the beginning, that all of these capabilities are unlocked. They were never there before.

And there are going to be generations of law students who never know a different way, who say, “What do you mean you had to sit down and just talk to people and hope that they were telling you the truth during the interview?”

Bridget McCormack: And you used to let humans drive those cars? Why did you do that? What were you thinking?

Jen Leonard: So dangerous.

Kirsten, what do you think about law students and prospective law students?

Kirsten Talmage: Yeah, I think there are two things I would add for prospective law students.

I think it’s a great way to assess the AI readiness of the schools to which you’ve been accepted. So you could take the framework and apply it to the programs and training that the law schools offer in the areas of AI and innovation.

And then the second thing, just as Farrah was speaking, is that there is an ethical and governance area here.

Because I think, as Bridget said, there’s going to be a time when law students don’t know that AI didn’t used to exist. They don’t know their daily lives without using AI.

And I think there is the risk of complacency and familiarity there that sort of loses the ethical obligations that we, as attorneys, need to keep in mind.

So I think using the framework in that manner throughout your life cycle — from being a law student into your practice, when you pass the bar and become an attorney — is really important.

It’s important to keep that part of the framework in mind, because I think it can be lost as we become more and more comfortable with AI.

And I think that goes also to using AI as a thought partner and not a replacer for an attorney, and for a law student as well. I think it’s particularly important.

Bridget McCormack: I appreciate that it sounds like it’s built in a way that has flexibility.

So as the technology and the skills that lawyers need to learn change, I think the framework probably can change with it and can be updated.

You can imagine that being a reason not to do it, right? “Well, we don’t know yet what it’s going to look like.”

And I feel like a lot of lawyers have that reaction to the technology generally. So I love that you guys just were like, “Nope, we can add value by putting together where folks can be now.”

What’s next? Is it possible that we can get something from PLI? Because I really would like to go do it and win. I would like to win the framework.

Can you give me something if I win? Is there any certification, assessment, anything like that coming?

Kirsten Talmage: Yes. Right now, we’re in the experimentation phase with a few things. One is an assessment, because for every framework or every competency matrix, if you will, it’s always helpful if you are taking an assessment that is unbiased and you’re answering questions based on your own knowledge.

You could read the framework and identify where you are. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could take — let’s use “quiz,” that’s a little more exciting than “assessment,” although assessment is the proper term — you could take a quiz and find out your areas of strength and weakness.

And then even what to hone in on. We could recommend trainings based on those areas of strengths and weaknesses.

So it could be a whole unified ecosystem of ensuring that attorneys are constantly rising to that next level of proficiency for each of the different pillars.

And then certification is something that we have tossed around. We have CLE, and that’s been our main focus, but certainly there is something around the certification without creating the linearity in the framework, because that’s something we really want to avoid.

Farrah Pepper: Well, and I’m going to give an unsolicited fangirl glowing review of what the team at PLI is doing.

I have been fortunate to be part of the PLI Innovation Council and, as I mentioned, faculty for years and years. And what I love about what PLI is doing is they are very much walking the walk.

They are an old organization that people might think about as only doing one thing. People might just say, “Oh, I get my CLE from PLI,” and then that’s all they know.

But I’ve seen firsthand that they are really experimenting and leaning hard into AI and all sorts of other creative ways of teaching and learning.

And that’s exactly what the industry has to do too: shed old images, shed what you think you know, because everyone’s in this period of reinvention.

And the winners, Bridget, are going to do exactly what you want to do: get in there, try it, and win.

Bridget McCormack: I want everyone to win. The whole profession.

Jen Leonard: And if you’re out there listening and you want to be part of this and learn more about it, where can people actually find the framework?

Kirsten Talmage: They can find it on the homepage of PLI. So pli.edu is where the framework sits.

Bridget McCormack: Do you have to have some kind of membership or subscription to access it?

Kirsten Talmage: You do not. It is free to download. Anybody can download it.

Bridget McCormack: Awesome. We’ve got to get that word out to law students because I do love that. If I were a law student, I would love that.

Jen Leonard: And also, law students are very good at advocating internally for what they want. So when they discover that not everything in the framework is on their course schedule or available to them, they can advocate for change from their own perspective and position, which I love.

Farrah Pepper: Well, and Kirsten, we didn’t explicitly say this, but I think it’s implied that if anyone is listening to this, and you review what you see in the framework and you have strong views — you either think something should be different, or you want to actually bring it inside your organization and deploy it — reach out.

I think the group that put it together would love nothing more than to engage with people who feel similarly passionate about this topic.

Kirsten Talmage: One hundred percent.

We are always looking for feedback. In fact, I keep a note on my phone of feedback for the framework. So I am happy to talk to anybody who has opinions on it.

It can only get better.

Jen Leonard: And it only will get better.

And we’re so grateful to both of you for spending your time to share this exciting development with, I’m sure, many people who weren’t familiar with it and are now eagerly typing into their web browser to find a copy of the framework.

You’re both fantastic, and it was lovely to talk with both of you.

And we’re so grateful to everybody who is listening right now. This ends another episode of AI and the Future of Law, and we look forward to our next conversation, which will be totally different because every day in the AI era is totally different.

So until we speak again, we hope that you are well, and we’ll see you next time.