AI Academy | AI for Legal

AI for Legal

Legal professionals are trapped in an impossible equation: workload keeps outpacing capacity, admin and contract review keep displacing counsel time, and the business keeps expecting faster, sharper, more strategic advice with the same limited hours. The result is a function that spends its days in reactive firefighting while the strategic partnership work that matters most gets pushed to the margins. This professional certificate series is designed to help you break free from that trap and transform into a strategic, AI-forward legal professional.

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4 Course Series Duration 4 hours
Released May 2026

Course Level Beginner to Intermediate

Certification Professional certificate awarded after exam

Format On-demand videos to learn at your own pace

About This Series

The AI for Legal Professional Certificate is a comprehensive learning journey designed to transform how you approach corporate legal work in the age of artificial intelligence. You will move from understanding the strategic imperative for AI adoption to building a complete, prioritized action plan for your specific role and organization.

Across four courses, you will master frameworks for identifying and prioritizing AI opportunities, learn to navigate the complex technology landscape with confidence, and develop hands-on skills that put you ahead of the vast majority of legal professionals. Whether you are a corporate attorney managing contracts, matters, and counsel to business partners or a general counsel responsible for enterprise risk, legal function performance, and advising the C-suite, this series will equip you with the mindset, methodology, and practical capabilities to lead AI transformation in your legal function.

You'll Learn To

Diagnose the fundamental human capacity constraints limiting the traditional corporate legal operating model and understand why AI represents a transformational solution.
Apply a strategic framework to categorize AI opportunities by their value and transformation potential across contracts, matters, compliance, and enterprise risk.
Build a comprehensive, prioritized AI blueprint tailored to your specific legal role and organizational context.
Navigate the complex AI technology landscape using a systematic approach to tool selection and vendor evaluation.
Master essential hands-on AI skills that enable immediate execution on your prioritized use cases.
Transform from a reactive, admin-constrained legal professional to a strategic, AI-forward counselor who delivers measurable business impact.

Key Questions Addressed

This series is structured to answer the most critical questions for AI adoption in legal, including:

Why is the traditional corporate legal operating model fundamentally unsustainable, and what makes AI different from the legal tech investments the function has made for decades?
Where should I focus my limited time and resources to achieve the greatest impact with AI across contracts, matters, compliance, and strategic counsel?
How do I move from isolated experiments and random acts of AI to a systematic, strategic approach to AI adoption?
What specific AI capabilities can automate my most time-consuming contract and compliance work and amplify my strategic impact with the business?
How do I evaluate and select the right AI technologies for my specific legal use cases and organizational context?

Who It's For

This certificate series is designed for:

Corporate Legal Practitioners: Corporate attorneys, associate general counsel, deputy GCs, senior counsel, compliance officers, and legal operations professionals seeking to automate admin work and elevate their strategic contribution to the business.
Legal Leaders: General counsel, chief legal officers, heads of legal, and senior in-house leadership responsible for building scalable, high-performing legal functions and advising the C-suite on enterprise strategy and risk.
Business Leaders: Executives and managers outside legal who want to understand how AI-powered legal functions can accelerate deal velocity, improve compliance, and strengthen enterprise risk management.

This series is ideal for learners seeking both personal and business AI transformation.

What You'll Do

Engage with interactive video lessons that combine strategic frameworks with real-world demonstrations.
Complete guided exercises to identify your biggest time-consuming tasks, strategic challenges, and transformation opportunities.
Build two comprehensive workbooks: a Use Case Workbook cataloging bottom-up efficiency opportunities and a Problem-Based Workbook mapping top-down strategic initiatives.
Practice hands-on AI skills including advanced prompting techniques, building custom AI assistants, conducting AI-powered research, and creating knowledge bases from your own legal documents.
Develop a prioritized, sequenced AI action plan you can begin executing immediately.

Course Syllabus

Course 1: Your AI Opportunity in Legal
This foundational course diagnoses the structural problem at the heart of corporate legal: the human capacity constraint. You will explore how demands on legal have outpaced human bandwidth for both practitioners and leaders, why workload is growing faster than teams can scale, and what makes generative AI fundamentally different from the legal tech investments the function has relied on for decades.

Through industry data, adoption trends, and real-world case studies from companies including Wells Fargo, Duracell, and others, you will understand why AI adoption in legal has reached a tipping point and why maintaining the status quo is no longer a viable strategy. By the end of this course, you will have a clear-eyed view of the opportunity and the urgency, setting the foundation for everything that follows.

What You’ll Learn
- Identify the fundamental tension between strategic business partnership and reactive contract and matter work that affects every legal professional.
- Analyze the data on capacity constraints, fragmented systems, and regulatory complexity that prove the traditional legal operating model is unsustainable.
- Differentiate generative AI from previous legal technology investments and understand why it represents a fundamentally different kind of capability.
- Evaluate real-world case studies of organizations achieving transformational results through AI-enabled legal work.
- Articulate the competitive and career risks of delayed AI adoption in legal.
Course 2: The AI-Powered Playbook for Legal
This course introduces the 3 A's Framework, a simple yet powerful mental model for categorizing and prioritizing AI opportunities in legal. You will move beyond random acts of AI to a strategic approach that builds momentum systematically.

Through dozens of legal-specific use cases spanning practitioner and leadership roles, you will explore how AI can eliminate repetitive contract and compliance work, enhance your strategic capabilities for counsel and risk management, and enable transformational outcomes that were previously impossible. By the end of this course, you will have a preliminary AI playbook with prioritized opportunities tailored to your role.

What You’ll Learn
- Apply the 3 A's Framework to categorize any AI opportunity by its value and transformation potential.
- Identify automation opportunities that eliminate repetitive contract review, intake, and compliance tasks to free up capacity for strategic counsel.
- Leverage augmentation to enhance your uniquely human skills with AI as a copilot for contract negotiation, legal research, risk reporting, and cross-functional advising.
- Envision acceleration opportunities that fundamentally reinvent legal work and create capabilities that were previously impossible.
- Prioritize opportunities based on impact, feasibility, and alignment with your goals.
Course 3: Finding Your AI Advantage in Legal
About This Course

This course introduces two complementary approaches for comprehensive AI opportunity discovery: the Use Case Model (bottom-up) and the Problem-Based Model (top-down). Together, they give you a complete picture of both tactical efficiency gains and strategic transformation opportunities in legal.

Using proprietary AI tools including JobsGPT, CampaignsGPT, and ProblemsGPT, you will learn to unbundle your legal role and workflows into component tasks, evaluate each for AI applicability, and build a comprehensive inventory of possibilities. You will also learn to start with your biggest strategic problems, like outside counsel spend, regulatory complexity, or enterprise risk visibility, and work backward to find AI solutions that create transformational value. By the end of this course, you will have two prioritized workbooks that form your personal AI Blueprint, a sequenced action plan you can actually execute.

What You’ll Learn
- Unbundle your legal role and workflows into component tasks to discover AI opportunities hiding in plain sight.
- Assess each task for AI applicability, time savings potential, and implementation feasibility.
- Articulate strategic legal problems as clear statements with quantified value to build compelling business cases.
- Prioritize opportunities using a structured methodology that balances value, ability, and strategic alignment.
- Create a balanced portfolio of quick wins and strategic investments that build momentum over time.
Course 4: Applied AI for Legal
This capstone course bridges the gap between strategy and execution. You will learn a systematic framework for navigating the complex AI technology landscape, starting with the tools you already own before exploring frontier models and specialized legal AI platforms. You will also master the essential hands-on skills that separate AI-forward legal professionals from everyone else.

Through live demonstrations and guided practice, you will develop proficiency in advanced prompting techniques, building custom AI assistants, conducting AI-powered deep research, and creating knowledge bases from your own legal and regulatory documents. By the end of this course, you will have the practical capabilities to begin executing on your AI Blueprint immediately.

What You’ll Learn
- Navigate the AI technology landscape using a tiered framework that minimizes risk and maximizes existing investments.
- Evaluate AI vendors using a structured methodology that separates real solutions from marketing hype.
- Master high-performance prompting techniques that dramatically improve AI output quality.
- Build custom AI assistants that turn your best prompts into reusable, shareable applications for your legal team.
- Leverage AI-powered deep research capabilities to synthesize complex regulatory and legal information in minutes instead of hours.
- Create AI knowledge bases grounded in your own trusted legal documents for accurate, auditable answers.
Final Exam

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Dshanya Reese
Strategic Insurance Marketer

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Erin Carpenter
Sr. Digital Marketing Director

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Yadin Porter de León
Leading Global CXO

About the Instructor

Mike Kaput is a marketing and business AI expert, speaker, and author. In his role as SmarterX’s Chief Content Officer, he uses dozens of powerful AI tools daily to increase productivity and performance across hundreds of use cases. And his actionable talks can teach you and your team how to do the same thing.

Mike’s talks help companies of every size in any industry to capture massive productivity and performance gains using practical AI knowledge, use cases, and tools. They also make AI approachable and accessible for professionals at every level and in every function.

The result is that companies in every industry—including The Financial Times, Vimeo, and Vodafone—have come away from Mike’s talks armed with everything they need to start building a competitive advantage with AI.

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AI for Legal

About This Series

AI for Legal

You'll Learn To

Key Questions Addressed

Who It's For

What You'll Do

Course Syllabus

Course 1: Your AI Opportunity in Legal

Course 2: The AI-Powered Playbook for Legal

Course 3: Finding Your AI Advantage in Legal

Course 4: Applied AI for Legal

Final Exam

AI Academy Pricing

Dshanya Reese
Strategic Insurance Marketer

Erin Carpenter
Sr. Digital Marketing Director

Yadin Porter de León
Leading Global CXO

About the Instructor

Related Courses

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Intro to AI

5 Essential Steps to Scaling AI

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Education

About

AI for Legal

About This Series

AI for Legal

You'll Learn To

Key Questions Addressed

Who It's For

What You'll Do

Course Syllabus

Course 1: Your AI Opportunity in Legal

Course 2: The AI-Powered Playbook for Legal

Course 3: Finding Your AI Advantage in Legal

Course 4: Applied AI for Legal

Final Exam

AI Academy Pricing

Dshanya ReeseStrategic Insurance Marketer

Erin CarpenterSr. Digital Marketing Director

Yadin Porter de LeónLeading Global CXO

About the Instructor

Related Courses

Free AI Classes

Intro to AI

5 Essential Steps to Scaling AI

Dshanya Reese
Strategic Insurance Marketer

Erin Carpenter
Sr. Digital Marketing Director

Yadin Porter de León
Leading Global CXO