Getting Students Ready for Tomorrow
In UC Law SF’s technology curriculum, students build AI tools and learn directly from the people who are shaping the field.
As artificial intelligence shapes modern legal practice, UC Law SF is training students with little or no coding experience to build AI tools, challenging them to design, test, and question the influential technology.
Students in the school’s AI-Enabled Lawyering Lab use AI for core lawyering tasks — research, drafting, discovery, and document analysis — while engaging with ethical issues around privilege, conflicts, and professional responsibility.
Offered for the first time in Spring 2026, the AI-Enabled Lawyering Lab is part of UC Law SF’s technology law and lawyering center, LexLab, and will become a requirement for 2L students starting with the incoming Class of 2029.
The six-session course was conceived by Shashi & DJ Deb Professor of Practice for Emerging Technology and Law and Director of Applied Innovation Tal Niv, and is taught by two adjunct professors: software engineer-turned-lawyer Luis Villa and Zoe Dolan ’05, who has rich experience helping self-represented litigants use AI.
Saamia Aziz ’26 built DepoBaby, designed to help small businesses in breach-of-contract matters by using complaints and other court documents to quickly create case timelines, party relationship maps, and preliminary discovery plans. “Understanding how these tools are built — not just how to use them — means I’ll be better positioned to evaluate, adopt, and advocate for the right technology as my practice develops,” Aziz said.
Nicholas Nguyen ’26 built an AI tool to help inventors assess patent risk. He said the tool uses AI to review patent claims from a freedom-to-operate analysis, helping inventors write their patents so inventions are better protected while also learning if their work might infringe existing patents.
“I believe AI won’t replace all jobs but will assist us in completing a task,” Nguyen said. “We still need to do our own research, due diligence, and analysis. From this course, I’ve learned that AI helps me become more well-rounded and concise in my work. It can offer new perspectives or expand my research scope to find solutions.”
More on technology and law:
Bringing the Profession Up to Speed
Advisory Board on the Technological Transformation of Legal Practice & Education
John Tavares ’26
AI Lawyering Lab Capstone Project: PromptCounsel
Designed for self-represented clients, it refines basic questions about a case to surface key facts that non-lawyers might overlook — then generates both a structured issue summary and an optimized prompt. The goal is to help users get more accurate legal guidance from AI and better prepare them if they seek help from an attorney.
On AI and the Law: “I believe AI has enormous potential to transform the legal field, and I wanted to get ahead of it by understanding how to use these tools effectively.”
Susmita Nanda LLM ’26
AI Lawyering Lab Capstone Project: GroundCheck
Designed to test whether cases and materials cited in legal documents support the propositions for which they are referenced, and provides a structured recommendation on citations to a human reviewer.
On AI and the Law: “AI is already reshaping legal practice, and I wanted to understand how these tools are built and where they fail, not just how to use them.”