Ready for Tomorrow: 3L Saamia Aziz uses AI to streamline civil litigation work 

This photo is a headshot of 3L Saamia Aziz wearing a black shirt and smiling.

Through UC Law SF’s AI-Enabled Lawyers Bootcamp, 3L Saamia Aziz went from curious about AI to building tools that could expand access to sophisticated legal analysis.

 

  • 3L Saamia Aziz built DepoBaby from scratch in UC Law SF’s AI-Enabled Lawyers Bootcamp, gaining hands-on AI experience with little prior coding background. 
  • She designed the tool to help small businesses access early-stage case analysis typically available only to better-resourced civil litigants. 
  • The hands-on program prepared her to start a career in civil litigation with the skills to build, evaluate, and apply AI in practice. 

 

As artificial intelligence reshapes legal practice, UC Law San Francisco is training students through a hands-on AI-Enabled Lawyers Bootcamp that moves them beyond theory and into real-world application before they graduate. Students gain direct experience using AI for core lawyering tasks—research, drafting, discovery, and document analysis—while engaging with ethical issues around privilege, conflicts, and professional responsibility. In a capstone project, they build their own AI tools, often with little or no coding experience. 

Offered for the first time this spring, AI Bootcamp is part of UC Law SF’s technology law and lawyering center, LexLab, led by Director Drew Amerson. The eight-session course was conceived by Director of Applied Innovation Tal Niv and taught by Adjunct Professors Luis Villa and Zoe Dolan ’05—practicing attorneys with deep experience integrating technology into legal work. 

Below, 3L student Saamia Aziz reflects on what she learned and how she used AI to build a tool supporting early-stage civil litigation case work. 

Why did you enroll in AI Bootcamp?  

AI is a tool that can bridge the gap between a profession rooted in tradition and one that is evolving rapidly. I wanted to move beyond the surface-level conversation about AI in law. When I heard partners at the firm I’m joining say that new attorneys need to learn this, it landed differently than the general buzz around AI. The bootcamp felt like a rare chance to get that hands-on experience with the stakes low enough to actually experiment.  

What were your biggest takeaways? 

I learned that working with AI is a layering process, that you have to build up instructions in layers, refining and stacking context until the model produces something genuinely useful. I also came away with a sharper appreciation for how fast this technology is advancing. We discussed the latest news in AI as it was happening and heard directly from Professors Luis Villa and Zoe Dolan about their own experiences using AI in-house and running a pro se appellate clinic. It made the material feel immediately relevant. UC Law SF’s commitment to building AI literacy before we graduate is something I won’t take for granted. It’s the kind of forward-thinking investment that sets our school apart. 

Describe your capstone project. 

I built DepoBaby, a Streamlit app that takes a civil complaint as a PDF input and uses the Anthropic API to generate a case timeline, a party relationship map, and a preliminary discovery plan. The tool was specifically geared toward helping small businesses navigate breach-of-contract cases, providing the kind of organized case analysis that’s typically only accessible if you can afford to hire an attorney. I demoed it with real complaints, built it entirely in Python, a programming language (over 600 lines of code with Claude’s coding assistance), and used PDFPlumber for document parsing.  

How will this experience shape your work as a new attorney?  

I plan to go into civil litigation, and the bootcamp allowed me to test how AI can enter and expand that space. I ran a complaint through DepoBaby and watched it quickly generate a discovery plan that would take a junior associate hours to draft. It showed how the intake and analysis work traditionally done by junior associates is where AI can help attorneys move faster, or help small business defendants better understand cases before they can afford counsel. 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. 

The Ready for Tomorrow series highlights UC Law SF students as they share how the College’s innovative, hands-on programs prepare them for a profession being rapidly reshaped by AI and emerging technologies.