In brief
- Stanford Law School is launching the Legal Engineering Academy, a selective residential program training attorneys and executives to lead AI adoption within their organizations.
- Set to begin in summer 2027, the two-week curriculum will focus on hands-on workflow redesign, governance frameworks, and building AI solutions rather than classroom-based instruction alone.
- The program reflects a broader push to prepare legal leaders who can connect technical AI choices to questions of law, governance, and organizational change.
A new kind of leader is emerging across the legal sector. These professionals combine legal expertise with an engineering mindset, helping shape how legal teams use AI and adapt to rapid change.
Stanford Law School’s Executive Education program and the Stanford Law AI Initiative are launching the Stanford Legal Engineering Academy to better prepare these leaders for this quickly evolving role. The selective, two-week residential program will bring approximately 50 attorneys, executives, and other organizational leaders to Stanford University in summer 2027 for intensive training in AI strategy, implementation, governance, and organizational transformation.
Prospective participants can sign up now to receive program updates and be notified when applications open.
“Stanford Law continues to dedicate our expertise in teaching, research, and professional education to address with rigor the opportunities and challenges of frontier technologies in the legal profession,” said George Triantis, JSD ’89, dean and Richard E. Lang Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. “The Legal Engineering Academy adds an important new dimension to that work. Executive education programs like this one allow us to bring Stanford’s scholarship and teaching to experienced professionals who are making consequential decisions about the future of legal practice.”
The program is “designed to prepare participants to act as chief AI leaders within their organizations, whether or not they hold that formal title,” said Adam Sterling, associate dean of executive education and strategic partnerships. Participants will learn to develop organizational AI strategies, redesign workflows and services, create governance and risk frameworks, and build AI-enabled solutions to real organizational challenges.
The academy’s curriculum is being developed with a founding advisory board of approximately a dozen leaders from major artificial intelligence companies, leading law firms, corporate legal departments, civil society organizations, academia, executive search, and the broader legal technology sector.
Advisory board member and trial lawyer Christopher Kercher has worked extensively on the use of AI in high-stakes litigation and the development of institutional AI capabilities. “Choosing the tool is the easy part of using AI in real legal work,” he said. “Most of the effort goes into building the workflows and assembling the context around them. That is what legal engineering means in practice.”
Unlike programs centered principally on AI awareness or classroom instruction, the Stanford Legal Engineering Academy will emphasize hands-on building and application. Technical or coding experience is not required.
Nate Persily | Timothy Archibald
Nate Persily, the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law and co-director of the Stanford Law School AI Initiative, said lawyers and executives are increasingly being asked to play a central role in deciding how AI is integrated into institutions, what safeguards are put in place, and whose interests are protected. “This requires leaders who can connect technical choices to law, governance, and broader public consequences of how these systems are designed and used,” he said.
“Using an AI tool is not the same as understanding how to redesign work around it,” said Julian Nyarko, professor of law and co-director of the Stanford Law School AI Initiative. “The leaders who will be most effective in this transition will be able to assess where the technology adds value, recognize its limits, and translate that understanding into new workflows, services, and organizational structures.”
Julian Nyarko | Scott MacDonald
The curriculum will include sessions with Stanford faculty and leading practitioners, technical instruction for non-engineers, guided application-building exercises, workshops on workflow redesign and change management, and small-group collaboration among participants from different industries and sectors.
“Some of the most important insights will come from bringing together people who are tackling these questions from different sectors and institutional settings,” said Irene Liu, executive director of the Stanford Law School AI Initiative. “The academy will give participants the opportunity to test ideas, learn from one another, and develop agents and tools they can carry back to their organizations.”
The academy expands Stanford Law School’s portfolio of Executive Education Programs, which brings scholars and practitioners together to address complex challenges at the intersection of law, business, policy, and conflict resolution.
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This story was originally published by Stanford Law School.