Bringing the Profession Up to Speed - UC Law San Francisco (Formerly UC Hastings)

LexLab’s Law and Artificial Intelligence Certificate prepares counsel to understand AI risk, advise clients, and use new tools responsibly.

Artificial intelligence is no longer an abstraction. AI competence is increasingly essential for legal competence, as the technology is changing the practice of law and the market for legal services.

How does it actually work? What are the burning legal issues? And what does it mean for lawyers advising clients across innumerable fields and challenges?

Last year, Tal Niv, the school’s director of applied innovation and Shashi & DJ Deb Professor of Practice for Emerging Technology and Law, along with LexLab Fellow Cornelia Kutterer and LexLab Director Drew Amerson, launched the Law and Artificial Intelligence Certificate (LAIC) program to answer those questions — addressing AI legal issues, risks, and real-world applications for professionals.

“Lawyers need more than a surface-level understanding of AI,” said Niv. “They need enough technical fluency to evaluate what these systems can and cannot do, identify where legal risks arise, advise clients in an unsettled regulatory environment, and use AI tools in their own work without compromising confidentiality, accuracy, privilege, supervision, or professional judgment.”

In an LAIC session held in March, lawyers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and academics traveled to UC Law SF from as far as Tokyo and Switzerland to learn from a remarkable slate of 20 instructors. These included policymakers, entrepreneurs, and counsel from companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Cisco, Datadog, and GitHub, and top law firms including Orrick, Gunderson Dettmer, King & Spalding, and the Norton Law Firm. Sessions covered intellectual property, product liability, privacy, governance, risk in deploying AI tools, and more.

Sammy Zeer, global indirect tax manager at Expedia Group, came from Seattle to seek a stronger foundation in responsible AI governance. He said the program “offered a grounded exploration of both the transformative potential and the real risks” of AI and provided “an exceptional foundation” for understanding its implications.

The program also drew participants from outside the legal field. Jeff Huang, associate chair of the computer science department at Brown University, said, “I appreciated hearing the many approaches, from legal practitioners to the staffers who wrote some of the bills to international policymakers.”

The certificate program, Amerson said, “lets LexLab do what we do best: train lawyers and law students to think critically about technology, solve real-world problems, and lead in areas where law and innovation intersect.”