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I had a strategy question. I am an evening student in a secondary market. I took a couple years off after undergrad to work for a fortune 500 company overseas. I kept doing remote work for them during my first year (hence why I am an evening student) and my grades suffered a great deal as a result. I am URM who was a scholarship kid at one of the local fancy private schools growing up so I have some people from my past I could lean on for some networking help. (my background makes me perfectly suited for international law and it seems like those jobs are heavily concentrated in biglaw and thus im stuck in the rat race). The thing is I am currently at around at 2.85 (median at my school is ~3.1) with about 30 credits left over the span of a year to try and raise it up.

Does it make sense to just wait until closer to the end of law school, take the time risk, and at least try get it up to a 3+ before I start reaching out to these people? These aren't family members or people I feel necessarily comfortable burning these connections (I just don't see these people helping me again if my grades aren't quite up to snuff because they won't think I am very serious.) Or is time the most important factor here? What would you do in my shoes? I am a URM whose personable and really awesome work experience but shitty grades.

Definitely focus on grades. Work on getting up to median, then call in favors with your connections. A connection in big law is going to be able to help get your resume in front of the hiring partner/committee, but the hiring partner is not going to give you serious consideration if you are significantly below the firm's grade cut-off. It sounds like you are no longer working for your former company, so hopefully you now have the time to focus on course work and building up your GPA.

As an aside, what do you mean by international law? Are you talking about cross-border transactional work? Or living internationally while practicing US law? International law generally means public international law and/or private international law, which, apart for a very small number working in international arbitration, isn't an area most big law firms practice in.