Maude Tipton on Investing Early in the Skills of Modern Practice

Starting law school, my goal was to get the most out of it that I could. I came to Duke after three years of working, and I have so much gratitude for being a student again. I get to learn the law and legal skills every day in an environment where learning is the whole point. I don't take that for granted.

Part of what I set out to learn was how to best leverage legal AI to prepare for practice. Before law school I worked as a paralegal at a big law firm, and I saw firsthand the potential these tools have to change how legal work gets done at all levels. Considering this, I wanted to get involved with Harvey to get ahead of that change rather than watch it from a distance.

A lot of it was simply exposure, both to the product and to the people building it. I got to see how the teams here think about legal work: what AI is genuinely good at, where it needs a careful human eye, and how much rigor goes into getting that right. As a rising 2L, I'm still early in my legal training, so I tried to approach the summer as a student in both senses, learning the technology while also paying attention to how experienced lawyers evaluate and verify its output. If I took one thing away, it's that using these tools is a real skill, one that has to be practiced intelligently and carefully.

It means remembering that I own whatever I put my name on. AI can help me research faster or get to a first draft sooner, but it doesn't replace my judgment. Frankly, at this stage, part of the work is building that judgment in the first place. So I try to be deliberate: I use the tool to test my understanding, not to skip the understanding. I still do the reading. I still struggle through the reasoning. The way I see it, the fundamentals of legal reasoning, close reading, and clear writing are the foundation, and AI fluency is a layer on top of that. Without the foundation, the layer doesn't mean much.

I think of it as a bet I'm making with my time. Law school asks you to invest in a set of skills, and everyone invests in the core ones such as reasoning, reading, and writing. My bet is that fluency with legal AI belongs on that list too. I can't predict exactly how firms will use these tools in three years, but everything I saw this summer suggests that the lawyers who understand how to work with AI thoughtfully will be better positioned to serve their clients.

Additionally, I heard a managing partner say that because of AI, we're all now tasked with reviewing work. It used to be that as a junior, you submitted your work and someone above you reviewed it. Now everyone reviews. That's a skill I'm deliberately building, and I think it's going to be tremendously important.

I want the tool to be second nature by the time I start at a firm, so I'm spending my mental energy on the client's problem, not on figuring out the technology. Realistically, as a junior associate, I'll be learning constantly no matter what. But if I can walk in already knowing how to break a task down, delegate parts of the task to a tool, and check the output critically, that's time and attention I can put toward the most challenging parts. I think that workflow will increasingly be the expectation. I'd rather meet that expectation from the start than spend my first year catching up to it.

I'd be careful giving advice, since I'm a rising 2L and still figuring this out myself. But what's worked for me is simple: use AI when you can, and actually work with the tool rather than just reading about it or refraining entirely. Engage with the resources available to you. Harvey Academy, the prompt library, and the prebuilt agents are all there to help you build real proficiency, and they meet you wherever you're starting from.

And talk to your peers about how they're using the tool. Some of the best use cases I've picked up came from a classmate mentioning something in passing. None of us can say exactly what practice will look like when we graduate. But investing in your skills, all of them, the timeless ones and the new ones, seems like the safest bet a law student can make.