Cornell Legal AI Lab

Catalog description

The Cornell Legal AI Lab is a project-based course in which students design, evaluate, and deploy artificial intelligence systems for legal and dispute-resolution problems. Students work in small interdisciplinary teams on real projects proposed by external partners — including courts, legal-aid organizations, law firms, dispute-resolution bodies, and technology partners — under the supervision of Professor Dahan and researchers from the Conflict Analytics Lab. The course combines structured instruction on legal AI methods, benchmarking, reliability, and deployment (delivered by the instructor and invited researchers) with team-based project work supervised throughout the semester. Projects fall within three research tracks: access to justice, institutional and firm knowledge, and AI safety grounded in legal and institutional norms. Students develop hands-on skills at the intersection of law and artificial intelligence — including encoding legal reasoning into structured systems, evaluating model performance on domain-specific tasks, and assessing the reliability, ethical, and deployment challenges of legal AI in practice. No prior technical background is required.