The Paladin-PLI partnership signals the necessary reinvention of legal education by integrating on-demand skills training directly with real pro bono casework, giving law students the human judgment, client communication, and AI fluency that the profession now demands
Key highlights:
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The theory-practice gap is now an AI-era crisis— Integrating legal training with hands-on pro bono experience is the future of legal education.
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A collaborative model merges learning and doing into a single platform— The model connects law students with vetted pro bono opportunities from legal services organizations, while also offering targeted, skills-based training at the moment students step into those matters.
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Pro bono work is uniquely suited for responsible AI training— On-demand programs led by expert faculty are available to help students sharpen pro bono skills, understand the use of AI in today’s legal practice, and stay on top of developments in numerous industry and practice areas.
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Legal education has operated on a familiar, decades-long divide that saw students spend their first years learning the law in the classroom and then after graduation, gaining substantive experience practicing the law in the real world. This gap has always been costly for both students and legal employers, and now it’s emerging as untenable in an era in which AI is rapidly reshaping what junior lawyers do.
Pro bono and skills training close this gap
A new partnership between Paladin, a pro bono management platform, and the Practising Law Institute (PLI), a nonprofit provider of learning resources for legal professionals, is designed to close this gap while showing something larger about where legal education must go.
The partnership is designed to equip students with on-demand, actionable training that supports effective pro bono engagement by offering access to PLI’s training programs directly through Paladin’s platform. Since launching with 30 law schools in August 2025, students have signed up for thousands of pro bono cases through the platform, according to Kristen Sonday, Co-founder and CEO of Paladin.
For years, experiential learning in law schools was something students had to piece together on their own by hunting across spreadsheets, clinic listings, and externship postings for opportunities, says Sonday, adding that too often students were given little guidance on what they were walking into.
The partnership is designed to equip students with on-demand, actionable training that supports effective pro bono engagement
“What’s fundamentally different is the integration and centralization of learning and doing,” Sonday explains. “Historically, legal education has separated theory, training, and practice.” Now, she notes, a student can learn a concept, build confidence through targeted training, and apply it in a real-world setting within a short amount of time.
Kirsten Talmage, Chief Strategy Officer at PLI, describes the experience from the student’s perspective: “When a first-year logs into the Paladin platform, they are not thrown into the deep end. Instead, they can access skills-based programs, such as a PLI program specifically on how to interview a pro bono client before they ever sit across from someone in need. This leads to a better experience for the student, the law school, and especially for the client.”
Pro bono work suited to responsible AI training
The urgency behind this partnership is inseparable from the impact AI is having on the entry-level legal market.
“We’re already seeing AI reduce the time spent on tasks like initial legal research, document review, drafting memos, and summarizing case law,” Sonday says. “This is work that has traditionally formed the foundation of junior associate training.” The skills AI cannot replicate — such as judgment, issue spotting in ambiguous situations, client communication, and ethical decision-making — are what students need to develop deliberately earlier in their legal careers.
Indeed, those human skills are essential to the effective use of AI, Talmage says. The lawyer of the future will be a strategic advisor and creative problem solver, which are the very attorney roles that AI cannot fill, she explains, adding that those must be cultivated through experience. “You always need to be questioning and verifying and authenticating — and that’s generally a lawyer’s role.”
For years, experiential learning in law schools was something students had to piece together on their own by hunting across spreadsheets, clinic listings, and externship postings for opportunities.
There is a particular logic as to why pro bono work is the right fit for learning to use AI responsibly. Pro bono is “a built-in, humans-in-the-loop model” in which students are always supervised by attorneys, Sonday says. And this supervision creates a structured environment in which to learn how to use AI tools, apply them to real matters, get feedback, and iterate. The result, Sonday argues, will be more attorneys who are AI-fluent early on and throughout their careers.
A message to law school leaders
For law school leaders, both Sonday and Talmage highlight that AI use has already changed the legal profession. The choice then for law schools is whether they evolve by design or by default.
Students know the legal profession has changed and so do employers, CLE providers, and clients, Talmage explains.
Sonday agrees. “The pace of change in the legal profession is accelerating, and students need to be prepared not just for the law today, but also for the practice of law in the future,” she says. “Integrating pro bono platforms and AI-specific training aligns legal education with reality.”
The Paladin/PLI partnership offers a blueprint for what legal education must become in the future, transforming itself into a space that’s grounded in applied legal knowledge, human-supervised, and AI-informed. Indeed, the best way to train the next generation of lawyers is to give them real clients, real cases, and real responsibility while they still have room to grow.
You can find more about the challenges facing law schools and legal education here
