by Jay Mandal, Chief Operating Officer, SAP; Codex Fellow and Guest Lecturer, Stanford Law School

On Saturday, May 20, CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics hosted the first-ever LLM x Law hackathon at Stanford Law School. With 150 participants, the hallways were abuzz with 40 teams of engineers, lawyers and students exploring the intersection of large language models (LLMs) and the law. I was energized by this

friendly and fearless community, and jumped in with Sacha Lévy and old buddy Vikram Grover to submit our own startup hack!

The finalists’ ideas, driven by LLM/generative AI tools, included:

1. An automated contract negotiation tool, where independent generative AI agents act as the two opposing parties and a moderator in order to negotiate specific terms
2. A 3D avatar of a lawyer verbally conversing with users, and able to answer basic legal questions
3. Automated creation of prepopulated legal complaints for lawyers that would draw upon news, reports, social media on a recent major event adversely impacting a population
4. A solution to evaluate transparency on every corporation’s compliance with salary disclosure laws to ensure applicants have full transparency on salary ranges
5. Two query and summarization tools for high-volume document due diligence, and for pdfs of depositions/court documents.
6. Assisting legally underrepresented minorities and economically disadvantaged segments to avoid coerced guilty pleas by a solution giving an individual immediate access to prior relevant case law and their past history (built by a 16-year-old coder!)

A few takeaways after speaking to the many fellow innovators:

1. The LLM movement has given innovators a powerful tool that could lead to the long-promised democratization of legal services to the vast majority of people who cannot afford legal services to protect themselves
2. Legal is only one vertical, but this community is fearless in looking to reimagine and disrupt medical, financial services, labor marketplaces, marketing, sales processes and many others from vulnerable incumbents
3. Not since my days back at Apple during the iPhone years have I witnessed such promise for the next revolutionary ecosystem of game-changing ideas and companies in all verticals

There’s lots of work ahead though. Thanks to the organizers and participants for lighting a creative fire yesterday in our AI and legal community (and beyond) to build toward a new future. It also inspired me to rethink how my co-lecturers and I will teach future AI and law classes at Stanford, and share with the greater community.

Kudos to my dear friends and colleagues Dr. Megan Ma , Roland Vogl , Pierre-Loic Doulcet and Raphael Ancellin as organizers of this trailblazing event presented by our CodeX, The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and to my longtime friend Aparna Sinha as a key sponsor and judge.

More info about the event here.