UC Law SF will require AI-enabled lawyering lab for all JD students

Students display their certificates of completion after presenting AI-focused capstone projects in the last session of the inaugural AI-enabled lawyering lab in April 2026, joined by Adjunct Professors Luis Villa and Zoe Dolan (left).

• UC Law SF is making its AI-enabled lawyering lab mandatory for all JD students, starting with the Class of 2029.
• Students will learn to use AI responsibly and effectively for legal work, including research, drafting, and workflow design.
• Along with core analytical, writing, and problem-solving skills, deep AI fluency is increasingly valued by legal employers.

As artificial intelligence accelerates change across the legal profession, UC Law San Francisco is taking a bold step to ensure its students keep up: the school is making its AI-enabled lawyering lab a requirement for all JD students, starting with the incoming class of 2029, who will complete the course in their second year.

“AI is quickly transforming what it means to practice and engage with the law,” said Provost & Academic Dean Morris Ratner. “This AI professional development program responds to feedback from employers and legal industry leaders who see technological fluency as a critical differentiator for job applicants.”

Launched as an optional offering in Spring 2026, the six-session program gives students hands-on experience using AI for core legal tasks while also covering the ethical dimensions of AI use, including privilege, conflicts, and professional responsibility. Offered through LexLab, UC Law SF’s technology law and lawyering center co-led by Director Drew Amerson, the program culminates with a capstone project in which students build their own AI tools, often with little or no prior coding experience. Participants earn a certificate of completion rather than academic credit.

UC Law SF Director of Applied Innovation Tal Niv explains why the lab program is going from optional to required, and what students can expect. Niv is the Shashi and DJ Deb Professor of Practice for Emerging Technology and Law, an endowed professorship that advances UC Law SF’s leadership in AI and innovation-focused legal education.

Tal Niv is UC Law SF’s director of applied innovation, faculty director of LexLab, and the Shashi & DJ Deb Endowed Professor of Practice for Emerging Technology and Law.

What is the AI Enabled Lawyering lab?

It’s a hands-on professional development program that prepares students for a legal market in which AI fluency, legal judgment, and responsible innovation are increasingly expected of new lawyers. Over six sessions that include live lectures and discussions, self-paced online assignments and Zoom meetings, students learn how to identify appropriate legal use cases for AI, evaluate tools critically, protect confidentiality and accuracy, design and build responsible workflows, and exercise the judgment that clients and employers will expect.

Through practical projects, students learn how to use AI responsibly for legal work while honoring professional duties. It is designed to help students become AI-enabled lawyers who can combine legal analysis, ethical judgment, technical fluency and practical problem-solving in a rapidly changing legal market.

Why is UC Law SF making this a requirement for all JD students?

AI tools are increasingly part of the legal work environment, but using them well is not simple or automatic. There is a real difference between casual use of an AI system and competent, ethical, professional use of AI in legal work. The latter requires training.

Students need to learn when AI can improve legal work and when it can distort it. They need to know how to test outputs, verify authority, protect confidentiality, preserve privilege, recognize bias, avoid overreliance, and decide which tasks should not be delegated to a machine. Those are not merely technical skills; they are lawyering skills.

It is also important that this training be required rather than optional. If AI education is treated as an elective, the students who already know they are interested in technology will self-select into it, while others may graduate without a shared foundation. But AI will affect students across practice areas, and every student deserves structured preparation for that reality.

Why is this a second-year course?

The timing is intentional. The 2L year is a natural point in the JD curriculum for this kind of training: students have already developed a foundation in legal reasoning, research, and writing, and many are beginning to apply those skills in clinics, externships, summer positions, journals, competitions, and upper-level coursework. Introducing AI-enabled lawyering at that stage allows students to connect the technology to real legal work. It also ensures that all students receive a common foundation before they enter the most practice-intensive parts of law school and the profession.

Why does this requirement start with the graduating Class of 2029?

Starting with the class of 2029 allows us to build the requirement thoughtfully. Students need space to experiment, compare tools, test workflows, identify errors, and discuss the ethical issues that arise when AI is used in legal settings.

The program will remain available to 2L and 3L students in the coming school year. Students who started their 1L year last fall were invited to participate in the inaugural bootcamp offered in Spring 2026. This year, 2L and 3L students in the Classes of 2027 and 2028 can again voluntarily participate in the program.

What’s your response to critics who say incorporating AI in law school curriculum will weaken the development of core lawyering skills?

Requiring AI-enabled lawyering does not mean abandoning the traditional goals of legal education. Quite the opposite. The goal is to protect and strengthen students’ independent legal reasoning by teaching them how to use these tools critically rather than passively. Law schools should absolutely preserve spaces where students develop core analytical, writing, and problem-solving skills. But we cannot protect legal education by pretending the learning environment has not changed. Our responsibility is to design learning environments that meet this moment.