Learn to use AI competently in legal practice.
Our Work
Notes
Study platform for law school. Casebook reading, case briefing, course outlining, and spaced-repetition review.
Manual
Learn to use AI competently under Model Rule 1.1. Seven modules covering how the technology works, the ethics that govern its use, and practical approaches to research, drafting, and workflow design.
Field Notes
Monthly research newsletter on AI in legal practice. Court standing orders, bar guidance, tool evaluations, and workflow patterns from the field.
Most lawyers have not learned to use AI well.
Some are waiting to see what happens. Some are skeptical of the benefits. Some have adopted it, but are misusing it—citing hallucinated cases, leaking confidential information, or billing for work they cannot explain.
Meanwhile, a few are reaping the benefits: doing in minutes what used to take hours, matching larger firms' pace with smaller teams, and building workflows that compound their advantage over time.
"When a solo practitioner with AI can match a small firm's output, the practitioner without AI faces a structural disadvantage."
What Competence Looks Like
Understand the technology
Know what AI can do well and where it falls short. A chatbot product is not the same as the underlying model—the same base model behaves differently depending on the interface, retrieval layer, and safety settings around it.
Know how to prompt
Get useful output by structuring requests clearly. AI is usually better at revising than at choosing strategy—it adds the most value after you've decided the objective and structure.
Verify results
Legal research tools are not "hallucination-free." Retrieval-based systems can miss the right source, pull the wrong one, or answer incorrectly even when citing something real.
Build workflows
Managing the human-AI division of labor is a core skill. Know which parts of a task should stay human, which can be delegated, and where the handoff points should be.
About
LawBandit Lab was founded in 2024 to study how law students and practicing attorneys use generative AI in their work.
We publish research in two formats: as software used in the work itself, and as written reference material for lawyers adopting these tools in practice.
Our goal is to help lawyers become competent AI users—not to sell them on the technology, but to give them the knowledge they need to use it responsibly and effectively.
Leadership
Adan Ordonez
Founder and Director
JD candidate. Prior work on LawBandit's study platform for law students.