Berkeley Law Launches Hands-On AI Course for Upper-Level Students
Berkeley Law is offering a new three-credit course this fall that gives students more than 100 hours of training in using AI for legal work. The course, taught by Wayne Stacy, executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, focuses on using AI to improve the quality of legal analysis rather than simply working faster or cheaper.
Stacy, a former Big Law litigator and former leader at the U.S. Patent Office, developed the course after interviewing more than 20 lawyers at major firms about how they actually deploy AI. He chose Anthropic's Claude as the platform for instruction but designed the course to be "platform agnostic" - students will learn principles they can transfer to other tools.
Three Categories of AI Work in Law
Stacy divides current legal AI use into three categories. "AI automated" work covers low-complexity tasks like document review and basic research - work clients increasingly expect firms to handle without billing attorney hourly rates. "The disruption zone" includes mid-complexity work where AI can assist but human judgment remains critical. Lawyers who master this space outperform peers, Stacy says. "AI augmented" lawyering means using AI to deliver better client representation through novel arguments and strategic advice.
How lawyers deploy AI depends on their practice area. Personal injury plaintiff's lawyers adopt AI heavily because many cases follow similar patterns at particular stages, allowing them to handle more cases. Transactional lawyers use AI to build workflows that standardize processes and catch issues human-only teams might miss.
"The workflows are really the secret sauce," Stacy said. "You can standardize a process and make sure you're getting the same quality of analysis and escalating the things that need to be escalated."
Foundation Before Enhancement
The course is limited to second and third-year law students. Stacy said first-year students need to build foundational legal skills before using AI. Berkeley Law's faculty recently adopted a policy that defaults to prohibiting student use of AI, though instructors can allow it on a case-by-case basis.
"The foundational legal research and writing courses work," Stacy said. "The risk of cognitive offload by putting AI in those courses is too high, and there's really no benefit to it."
The course's 11 assignments progress from basic prompt engineering to using Claude's features together for research, contract drafting, and creative client solutions. Kristie Chamorro, an instructional and educational technology librarian at the Law Library, is assisting with the course.
What Distinguishes Lawyers
Stacy emphasizes that lawyers will remain central to client representation. When every lawyer has access to the same platform and data, judgment becomes the differentiator.
"What happens when every lawyer has access to the same platform and the same data set? What distinguishes one lawyer from the next?" he asked. "The answer is judgment, and we need to build that first."
He notes that while AI models can pass law school exams, they produce average work. Lawyers who use AI correctly can conduct higher-level analysis and deliver better client outcomes than they could alone.
For more on AI for legal professionals, explore how firms are integrating these tools into practice.
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