September 15, 2025 — Stanford, CA — Stanford Law School today announced the launch of the Legal Innovation through Frontier Technology Lab, or liftlab, to explore how artificial intelligence can reshape legal services—not just to make them faster and cheaper, but better and more widely accessible.
Led by Professor Julian Nyarko and Executive Director Megan Ma, liftlab is among the first academic efforts in legal AI to unite research, prototyping, and real-time collaboration with industry. While much of AI innovation in law has so far focused on streamlining routine tasks, liftlab is taking a broader and more ambitious approach. The goal is to tap AI’s potential to fundamentally change the way legal work serves society.
“The legal profession has not just an opportunity, but an obligation, to do more than just boost efficiency,” said Nyarko, faculty director of liftlab and co-chair of the Stanford Law AI Initiative. “We want to understand how technology can surface the expertise and reasoning that underpin the legal system in order to deliver better legal advice, prevent disputes, efficiently train new lawyers, and share the kinds of strategic insights that today only experienced practitioners tend to be able to leverage.”
A core component of liftlab is collaboration with leading law firms and AI companies. To date, liftlab’s founding advisors include legal technology company Harvey, and law firms Cleary Gottlieb, Davis Wright Tremaine and Vorys, among others. Through these relationships, liftlab ensures that its research and prototypes remain attuned to the realities of practice while being guided by an independent academic mission to produce work that is rigorous, publicly valuable, and responsive to the profession as a whole.
“Stanford Law School has long been a leader in anticipating the future of legal practice,” said George Triantis, JSD ’89, the Richard E. Lang Professor of Law and Dean of Stanford Law School. “In liftlab, Nyarko and Ma are bringing together rigorous research and real-world collaboration to shape how emerging technologies can enhance legal judgment, training, and access to justice. I’m proud that Stanford is on the forefront of asking what AI can–and should–do for the legal profession.”
Building on a Tradition of AI Leadership
Liftlab is one component of the Stanford Law AI Initiative, which coordinates and promotes AI-related activity at the law school and supports the school’s engagement with the legal profession, industry and government.
Stanford Law School has long been at the leading edge of studying, teaching, and shaping the future of technology. Stanford’s CodeX—the Center for Legal Informatics—was on the cutting edge of these issues decades ago, and its pioneering and continuing work, including in the area of the mechanization of legal reasoning, helped lay the groundwork for today’s initiatives. Stanford Law scholars are engaged in exploring the impact of AI tools on intellectual property, innovation, and the delivery of health care, among numerous other areas. The Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession is examining how AI is reshaping law practice and professional responsibility, the Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (RegLab) brings AI into government to solve real-world problems, and the Legal Design Lab is advancing AI with a human-centered focus, designing tools and co-pilots to help legal aid attorneys better serve their clients.
From Insight to Prototype: New Models for Legal Innovation
Liftlab works closely with Stanford University’s broader research community, including computer scientists, linguists, and scholars at Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute (HAI), to develop and test the tools to bridge law and technology. Liftlab already is developing a wide range of advanced AI applications, including multi-agent simulations (which model how legal teams interact and make decisions), multimodal systems (which combine text, audio, and visual inputs to analyze legal processes like depositions), and legal-specific language models (AI tools trained to understand and generate complex legal text).
The Contractual Drafting Risk Assessment tool is one of roughly a number of initiatives already in development at liftlab. Created in collaboration with HAI, the tool draws on thousands of court opinions on contract interpretation to identify language historically prone to dispute, enabling contract drafters to craft clearer and more resilient agreements.
In another project, liftlab designs tools to help young attorneys and law students master negotiation and other key practice skills through immersive, real-world simulations. And in collaboration with Stanford Law School’s Mills Legal Clinic, liftlab is building an AI “intake specialist” for the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. The empathetic, multilingual voice agent conducts initial client screening for potential cases. Prospective clients can simply call or text a dedicated number, and the AI assistant patiently walks them through the intake process in their preferred language, freeing attorneys to focus on legal work.
The essence of liftlab’s mission is ensuring that its tools and innovations directly serve the needs of lawyers and consumers of legal services, said Ma, liftlab’s executive director.
“Our collaborations allow us to develop tools shaped by actual user needs and capable of delivering meaningful value in professional settings,” she said. “They also help bring transparency and clarity to the metrics that define quality. Many law firms are eager to experiment with AI tools, but lack the time or infrastructure to evaluate these tools rigorously. That’s where we come in—offering a research-backed, neutral space to test, refine, and develop what actually works.”
About Stanford Law School
Stanford Law School is one of the world’s leading institutions for legal scholarship and education. Its alumni are among the most influential decision makers in law, politics, business, and high technology. Faculty members argue before the Supreme Court, testify before Congress, produce outstanding legal scholarship and empirical analysis, and contribute regularly to the nation’s press as legal and policy experts. Stanford Law School has established a model for legal education that provides rigorous interdisciplinary training, hands-on experience, global perspective and a focus on public service.
