2L Marilyn Aguilar-Portillo designed a program that uncovers bias in legal cases, gaining practical experience in applying technology to enhance legal analysis and advocacy.
- 2L Marilyn Aguilar-Portillo built an AI tool in UC Law SF’s AI-Enabled Lawyers Bootcamp to detect patterns of bias in legal cases.
- She learned how to use AI to analyze cases, improve efficiency, and support more effective advocacy.
- The experience gave her a practical framework for integrating AI into her future legal practice.
As artificial intelligence reshapes legal practice, UC Law San Francisco is training students through a hands-on AI-Enabled Lawyers Bootcamp that moves them beyond theory and into real-world application before they graduate. Students gain direct experience using AI for core lawyering tasks—research, drafting, discovery, and document analysis—while engaging with ethical issues around privilege, conflicts, and professional responsibility. In a capstone project, they build their own AI tools, often with little or no coding experience.
Offered for the first time this spring, AI Bootcamp is part of UC Law SF’s technology law and lawyering center, LexLab, led by Director Drew Amerson. The eight-session course was conceived by Director of Applied Innovation Tal Niv and taught by Adjunct Professors Luis Villa and Zoe Dolan ’05—practicing attorneys with deep experience integrating technology into legal work.
Below, 2L Marilyn Aguilar-Portillo shares how she built an AI tool to uncover hidden patterns of bias in legal cases and what she learned through the experience.
Why did you enroll in AI Bootcamp?
I genuinely believe the next revolution in society is here, and those who can ride this new wave of technology will be unstoppable. I saw the Bootcamp as the perfect way to continue positioning myself at the forefront of this new era.
What were your biggest takeaways?
I gained the foundational knowledge to keep expanding my horizons within AI. It taught me that the best way to keep learning is by doing, by experimenting with the models as they continue to progress. But the biggest lesson is that when AI is used intentionally and creatively, it can expand my reach as an attorney, allowing me to help more people in a more personalized and meaningful way. Thinking and talking through real AI dilemmas with experts in the field, like why Claude’s constitution matters and what’s at stake when we build these systems, was such a valuable experience and something I’ll always carry forward as these systems continue to evolve.
Describe your capstone project.
My capstone project is the CRT Trial Auditor — a tool that applies Critical Race Theory to analyze real case files. It helps identify subtle patterns, such as coded language or unfair assumptions, that can influence case outcomes yet often go unnoticed. By surfacing these shadow narratives and how they frame a person’s choices, character, and intersecting identities, the tool helps ensure people aren’t reduced to stereotypes or stripped of their complexity in the courtroom. It’s the project I didn’t know I needed to build until I started building it.
How will this experience shape your work as a new attorney?
I learned just how powerful AI models have become and that they will continue to grow, but also where their limitations are. Most importantly, I learned how to use them to supercharge advocacy. Working with AI feels like getting a jetpack. Everything we already do as lawyers, we can now do faster, sharper, and at a scale that wasn’t possible before. I now have a practical framework for integrating AI into every stage of my future practice.
The Ready for Tomorrow series highlights UC Law SF students as they share how the College’s innovative, hands-on programs prepare them for a profession being rapidly reshaped by AI and emerging technologies.