AI Policy and LegalTech – a master’s course
A master’s-level course launched in 2025 that gives law students working technical literacy and assesses them by building tools rather than writing essays.
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LegalTech is widely misunderstood as a synonym for artificial intelligence. It is considerably older and broader: it covers every technology that can be used in the legal profession to increase a lawyer’s effectiveness. What has changed recently is not the existence of the field but its necessity – lawyers unfamiliar with emerging technologies will simply be less effective than those who are.
The course was launched in 2025 as part of the Law and Technology direction, and covers the technical foundations we believe every lawyer now needs:
- Digital signatures and digital validation
- The legal frameworks governing artificial intelligence, with emphasis on European regulation – the AI Act, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act
- Practical, supervised use of AI tools as coursework
- Smart contracts and how they actually execute on a blockchain
- Data protection, confidentiality and professional ethics in technology adoption
The course syllabus was further revised following the UCBP reciprocal visit of Professor Nicole Morris of Emory University School of Law, incorporating insights and approaches discussed during her visit.
Assessment by construction
The final assessment is not a quiz. Students build a working document-automation tool that removes repetitive work from a task they will genuinely perform. More than half of ordinary legal work is repetitive – asking a client a fixed set of questions, asking follow-up questions conditioned on those answers, and assembling a document from the result. Repetitive work can be automated, and building the automation teaches the underlying legal logic far more effectively than describing it.