Ready for Tomorrow: Susmita Nanda LLM ’26 uses AI to analyze strength of support for legal arguments

This is a headshot of Susmita Nanda LLM '26, wearing a black blazer and a white shirt.

In UC Law SF’s AI Bootcamp, Susmita Nanda LLM ’26 built GroundCheck, an AI tool that checks whether legal citations hold up under scrutiny.

  • Susmita Nanda LLM ’26 learned how to critically evaluate and create legal technology tools in UC Law SF’s AI-Enabled Lawyers Bootcamp.
  • She built GroundCheck, an AI-powered platform that tests whether legal authorities actually support cited arguments.
  • The AI Bootcamp shifted her focus from what AI can do to how legal AI systems should be designed, tested and responsibly used.

 

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 six-session course was conceived by Director of Applied Innovation Tal Niv and taught by Adjunct Professors Luis Villa and Zoe Dolan—practicing attorneys with deep experience integrating technology into legal work.

Below, Susmita Nanda LLM ’26 shares what she learned and how she created an AI-powered tool to scrutinize citations that claim to support a specific legal argument.

Why did you enroll in AI Bootcamp?

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. This was the time to do it.

What were your biggest takeaways?

I gained a practical framework for understanding where AI should support human review versus replace it, and hands-on experience building an AI-agentic workflow rather than just consuming one. The program helped bridge the gap between knowing how to use an AI tool and how to deploy it responsibly and effectively.

It also shifted my perspective from “what can this tool do for me” to “how does it work, and what should it never do,” a mindset I’ll carry into practice regardless of how platforms evolve.

Describe your capstone project.

I built GroundCheck, a Harvey AI Workflow agent that checks whether legal authorities support the propositions cited in a draft; not just whether citations exist, but whether they hold up under scrutiny. It runs a first-pass grounding review followed by an adversarial second pass, then hands a structured recommendation to a human reviewer.

How will this help you excel as a new attorney?

I can now evaluate AI legal tools from the inside, understanding their architecture and failure modes well enough to use them critically and advise others. Building GroundCheck also sharpened my instinct for what makes legal analysis reliable because designing a system that explains its reasoning forced me to think rigorously about the same question every good lawyer faces.

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.