Taught by Berkeley Center for Law & Technology Executive Director Wayne Stacy — a former Big Law litigator and U.S. Patent Office leader — the course will focus on enhancing legal skills without lowering the threshold for human judgment and input.
As AI increasingly shapes legal practice, Berkeley Law has a new course starting this fall aimed at educating students about the technology’s strengths and weaknesses while giving them more than 100 hours of hands-on training.
Taught by Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (BCLT) Executive Director Wayne Stacy — a former Big Law litigator and U.S. Patent Office leader — AI and the Practice of Law: Public Interest & Private Practice will focus on enhancing legal skills without lowering the threshold for human judgment and input.
“This is the fundamental question: How are you going to do higher quality legal work with AI than you’re going to do by yourself?” Stacy asks. “It’s not just being faster and cheaper. The jump in the quality of work, in the creativity for your client, is the difference. That’s what I want my students to learn.”
Stacy, who has a background in computer engineering and took the helm at BCLT in 2021, started as something of a skeptic. After reading a stream of articles predicting AI would make young lawyers essentially obsolete, “it seemed like scare tactics to get people to click on headlines,” he says.
Sure, he reasoned, there are some routine tasks that AI could take over. But the law is full of complexities that a model might miss.
Like any good patent lawyer, Stacy started teaching himself the technology. Quickly, he came to understand that while AI models are continuously improving, it’s the platforms set up for lawyers to use them that are going to change the legal industry. Once someone understands the right way to use the platform, future innovations are built in.
“I realized that what we needed is a class to show what the foundations of an AI-based legal platform are and how you use it,” he says.
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