Journey to the Frontier.

Yes. That's the most common starting point, not a disqualifier. Several of Cohort 1's strongest builds came from lawyers who, two weeks earlier, didn't know what the terminal was (one bought a second-hand MacBook to start). The Claude-era stack is built for non-coders, and your mentor calibrates to exactly where you are. The bar is judgement, not engineering.

No. Picking what to build is half the work, and the first week is partly for finding it with your mentor. A good test: the thing you'd use yourself, daily. If you wouldn't, neither would anyone else. You don't need an app, either; a workflow, a document pipeline, a monitoring routine, or just a repeatable capability all count.

Yes, and it's designed around exactly this. You build on your own machine, your own plan, and on de-identified or public material. Cohort 1 used synthetic data, public filings, public title records, and the like. Nothing confidential goes near a model or a public repo. Your mentor never needs to see anything privileged. The judgement transfers even when the data can't leave your laptop.

It's educational, not an audition. LegalQuants isn't a studio or a VC, the residency isn't a tryout for a job, and we claim no IP in what you build. It's yours, on your own terms, and it travels with you. What you keep afterwards is the build, the habit, alumni access to the community, and the platform for life.

A hackathon is a day and a course is a video. This is a mentor beside you, most days, for four weeks: watching your actual screen, scoping with you, and getting you to a shipped thing you can prove. The hackathons are where many people meet us; the residency is where the capability actually takes hold.

No. The goal isn't software engineering. It's scoping, building, and verifying AI-enabled legal work. The point is your judgement encoded in a tool, not lines of code. Your mentor handles the rest.

Two to three hours a day, more if you go deep. The fixed live points are two webinars a week (Tue/Thu) and a 60-minute mentor 1:1 every other day (Mon/Wed/Fri). Everything else is async, on your own time.

Six sessions across the build weeks, taught by the whole mentor bench: Judgment (picking the right problem; owning your data and verifying AI output), Craft (CLAUDE.md, Skills, Hooks, Plugins; then pipelines, QA and shipping well), Career & sustaining, and Local models (running AI on your own hardware). All recorded for other timezones.

Cohort 1 ran across timezones from the US West Coast to New Zealand; some calls landed at 1am. Webinars run at a fixed slot and are all recorded, so you never lose the content, and your mentor works asynchronously through your private channel, so you're never blocked waiting.

Most lawyers we see have publication restrictions, so nothing is public by default. Your build stays internal, the Demo Day recording is cohort-gated, and peer review stays inside the cohort. You decide what, if anything, ever leaves the room.

The residency is $5,250 all in. A $500 deposit reserves your Cohort 3 (September) seat — credited in full toward tuition and transferable to a later cohort if September doesn't suit.

Yes. We provide an invoice, a course summary, and a certificate of completion for corporate sponsorship or reimbursement. For a whole team, use the corporate door above to scope a private cohort.

Two paths. You cancel: 50% refund up to 29 June 2026; after that, no refund except force majeure. Or we review your enrolment within 48 hours of payment and decide it isn't the right fit: full refund, no reason required.