Power Points
- 400 hours of AI tuition. Ropes & Gray lets first-year associates put about 20% of their hours target into AI training. The hours count toward the target. Clients are not charged for them.
- It’s spreading. The scheme now covers trainees and junior lawyers in Europe. A firm competition put 25 associate teams to work building real AI workflows.
- Clients aren’t waiting. AT&T has moved thousands of hours of law firm work to its in-house AI unit, signed up OpenAI, and plans to cut its national firm roster from about 30 to 18 to 20.
- The gap in one number. 70% of in-house lawyers expect AI productivity gains from outside counsel. 6% think most of their firms deliver.
BigLaw has hit a snag in its AI revolution. Lawyers who are expected to bill all day have no time left to reinvent how they work but the fix is to let associates take the time to learn the technology rather than squeezing the learning time into late night sessions when the billing is over.
Ropes & Gray’s TrAIlblazers programme lets first-year associates spend around 20% of their annual hours target on AI training and experimentation. On a 1,900-hour target, that is roughly 400 hours.
The time counts toward their requirements, but clients are never charged for it. This is credit for hours rather than client billing.
We reported the Ropes and Gray moves earlier this year, but now the firm has since extended the scheme to trainees and newly qualified lawyers in Europe as the firm develops its own legal AI in a joint venture with Open AI to build an agentic AI workflow system.
Its TrAIlblazer Cup paired summer and first-year associates in 25 teams across all seven US offices to build AI tools for real workflows, and the results are meant for firmwide use. It all means less “watch this webinar” and more “show us something useful”.
Any firm can announce an AI strategy in a press release but giving associates recognised time to learn it means putting it in the budget.
Meanwhile, the clients are learning faster
AT&T launched LegalEdge, an AI-first in-house unit of roughly 38 people, in January. Since then it has pulled thousands of hours of work back from outside firms, and on October 8 it named OpenAI as a design partner.
General counsel David McAtee says AT&T plans to trim its roster of national firms from about 30 to between 18 and 20 over two years, and to reward firms that adopt AI themselves.
The billable hour
Thomson Reuters’ 2026 Future of Professionals research puts numbers on the mismatch. Seventy per cent of corporate legal professionals expect outside counsel to deliver AI productivity gains, but only 6% think most of their firms do.
Almost a third are reconsidering firms that cannot show AI-enabled value within 12 months. Nearly two-thirds of law firm professionals say their firm’s pricing has not changed.
Training credits do not fix that prloblem because they deal with an earlier issue of how lawyers learn skills without being penalised on their reduced billing rates.
Buying the software was the easy part
“We use AI” is a software announcement, but showing a client how it improves turnaround, budget or decisions is a service proposition and clients increasingly know which one they are being sold.
BigLaw wants lawyers to become more efficient, and giving them time to learn is a start. The harder part is deciding what to reward once they have learned, and what to charge for it.
