The legal profession is changing quickly. As AI continues to reshape the work junior lawyers do, particularly tasks that have traditionally served as training grounds for new attorneys, experiential learning opportunities for law students have become even more valuable. Understanding where students choose to engage in pro bono work, the skills they are developing, and the communities they are serving can help law schools and legal employers design more effective programs that prepare students for the realities of modern practice.
Across the 28 law schools onboarded to Paladin during the 2025–2026 academic year, students signed up to take on more than 9,000 pro bono matters through the platform. The data provides a timely window into students’ interests, the skills they are building, the communities they are serving, and the practice areas where they are gaining early experience. It also highlights the growing role pro bono can play in preparing the next generation of lawyers for a profession being reshaped.
What the Data Shows
The most common pro bono practice areas selected by students through Paladin last academic year were immigration and asylum, criminal records and defense, family law, housing, and civil rights. Students are not simply looking for resume-building opportunities; they are choosing work where the stakes are immediate, personal, and deeply connected to a person’s stability, safety, family, employment, immigration status, and future opportunities. Importantly, they also require students to engage with facts that are messy, emotional, and sometimes, charged, exactly the kind of complexity that defines real legal practice.
That matters for the future of work. As AI accelerates legal research, document review, memo drafting, and other traditional junior-associate tasks, the most valuable early-career lawyers will not simply be the ones who can produce work product quickly. They will be the ones who can exercise judgment, communicate with clients, identify the right legal and human issues, and understand how to use technology responsibly in context. All of these top areas have complex, fast-changing regulatory environments, as well as high-stakes consequences for clients.
Pro Bono as Training
The skills students build through pro bono map directly to that future. The most common skills strengthened through Paladin opportunities this year included client intake and interviewing, legal research and writing, client advice and counseling, drafting/court filings, and community engagement and education. These are not “extra” skills separate from commercial practice; they are foundational lawyering skills that translate directly into billable work such as interviewing witnesses, preparing client updates, drafting filings and contracts, managing matters, conducting research, and communicating legal advice clearly.
Pro bono also gives students earlier exposure to responsibility. In many traditional settings, junior lawyers may spend their first years far removed from clients. Through supervised pro bono work, students can begin developing client judgment, empathy, project ownership, and ethical decision-making while still in law school. That experience helps them enter practice with greater confidence and a clearer understanding of what lawyers actually do.
The Communities Students are Serving
The community data adds another layer. The most common communities served included families, immigrants and refugees, incarcerated individuals, people experiencing poverty, and minority groups.
These matters expose students to the way legal issues intersect across housing, employment, benefits, immigration, family stability, criminal records, and economic mobility. That systems-level understanding is increasingly important across the profession, whether a student ultimately enters public interest, government, private practice, or corporate legal work.
Legal problems rarely arrive neatly packaged. A housing issue may also involve employment, public benefits, family stability, or immigration status. A criminal record may affect a person’s ability to work, rent an apartment, access education, or support a family. Pro bono gives students early exposure to that interconnected reality.
Key Learnings for Law Schools
As law schools look towards the next academic year, the data from last year points to several important trends that should inform their programs:
Students are drawn to high human-impact work.
The top practice areas, immigration, criminal records/defense, family law, housing, and civil rights, suggest that students are gravitating toward matters where the stakes are immediate and personal: safety, housing stability, family integrity, employment, status, and freedom.
Pro bono is exposing students to “real client” complexity early.
These practice areas often involve messy facts, urgent timelines, trauma-informed communication, and clients navigating multiple systems at once. That gives students experience with ambiguity and judgment earlier than many traditional law school settings.
Pro bono is developing highly transferable legal skills.
Even if students do not become immigration, housing, or family lawyers, the work maps directly to billable practice skills: interviewing clients, issue spotting, drafting, research, filing preparation, matter management, and explaining legal concepts clearly.
Students may be using pro bono to explore professional identity.
Practice-area choices can show what kinds of problems students want to be close to. High participation in poverty, immigration, racial justice, housing, and family-related matters suggests many students see law not only as a career path, but as a tool for direct service and social impact.
Sign-ups help law schools understand training gaps.
If students are frequently taking on immigration, housing, criminal record, or family law matters, schools can better tailor training around client interviewing, trauma-informed practice, ethics, AI use, cultural competency, and supervised practice readiness.
Pro bono shows where AI-era legal education needs to focus.
As AI changes entry-level legal work, the most valuable student experiences are those that develop judgment, communication, empathy, and responsible use of technology. The top pro bono practice areas are especially good environments for that because they are human-centered and supervised.
Law student pro bono is no longer just a service opportunity. It is a practical training engine for the future of legal work. As AI changes what junior lawyers are asked to do, pro bono can help ensure students develop the human, strategic, and client-facing skills that remain essential to excellent lawyering.
Kristen Sonday
Kristen is the Co-Founder and CEO at Paladin. As a first generation-college Princeton graduate, Kristen first witnessed how complicated our judicial system is to navigate while at the U.S. Department of Justice conducting international criminal work in Mexico and Central America. As one of the few Latinos on the team, she saw the immense value of having an advocate with you throughout the legal process, which inspired her to want to build something to increase access for those in diverse communities. After DOJ, she joined the Founding Team of YC-backed Grouper, where she learned how to build a startup from the ground up. In addition to Paladin, Kristen Co-Chairs the Legal Services Corporation’s Emerging Leaders Council and is a partner at LongJump, investing in overlooked founders in the Chicago area.
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