Academics
During your time in Hamburg, you will establish a foundation by which to examine the future of legal service operations. You will learn from excellent professors, work with participants from around the world and put your newly-acquired skills into practice.


Course Content
Over the course of three weeks, you will take part in core sessions, supplementary lectures and a discussion series to gain an understanding of technologies and processes that you will be able to apply to your own career.
- Core sessions involve treatment of examples relating to small, medium and large law firms, the justice system and non-profit legal service organizations.
- Assignments in individual class meetings will enable you to build skills in project management, data collection and the application of metrics.
Having gained an understanding of legal service delivery processes, theoretical discussions will help you to identify areas for improvement.
Applying your skills and knowledge, you will join an international team and take part in an intense 48-hour Legal Hackathon.
Hackathon
The Bucerius Summer Program in AI, Legal Technology, and Operations concludes with a hands-on hackathon—where theory becomes practice. In international teams, participants tackle real legal challenges and apply newly acquired skills to develop practical solutions.
Guided by an experienced coach, students collaborate, test new approaches, and refine their problem-solving abilities. Working in a diverse group fosters creativity and a deeper understanding of different perspectives in the legal field.
By combining practical application, teamwork, and expert guidance, the hackathon offers a dynamic learning experience that prepares participants for the evolving demands of the legal profession."
Study Trip

"The Berlin excursion was certainly a highlight of the program! The class bonded a lot over this trip! And most of the ideas for the Capstone Project came from the presentations we were given in Berlin." - from program evaluation
The program includes a multiple-day study trip that allows participants to learn how theory is put into practice in the real world. In past years, students visited companies, firms and organizations in Berlin, Potsdam and Frankfurt. Participants have visited, among others, YPOG, a leading law firm that has established its own legal solutions unit, Flightright a European start-up that embodies one approach to how legal technology can increase Access to Justice, RA Micro, a law firm that has implemented legal techology in its day-to-day operations, and the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam (read an article about the 2022 trip).
Schedule
- Course load: students follow a set curriculum that earns them 5 ABA or 10 ECTS credits
- Classes: Monday through Friday between 10 am and 5 pm for three weeks
- Extracurricular program: coordinated with the schedule as to not overlap with courses
Assessment and credit
Credits
- Although not accredited by the American Bar the program follows the ABA's standards for Student Study at a Foreign Institution
- Depending on the credit system at their home university, students can choose to earn 5 US ABA or 10 ECTS credits
- The home institution decides which and how many credits to accept for transfer
Assessment
- Hackathon participation and pitch (75%): Group assignment that receives an overall grade with the individual contribution being assessed to raise or lower the student's individual grade
- In-cass participation (25%): Attendance and active participation in at least 80% of program activities is required
Grading
- Grading scale: A+ to F
Certificate
Participants who successfully complete the program will receive a certificate of participation and transcript of grades.
Curriculum 2025
All Core Sessions
All Supplemental Lectures
Core Session Details
AI and Law
Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Daniel Katz
Students will receive an introduction to the emerging fields of Legal Analytics and Artificial Intelligence. The course will begin with a brief history of artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence + law. Then, we will turn our attention to data driven applications of such methods. Our goal is to introduce students to understand the process of extracting actionable knowledge from data, to distinguish themselves in legal proceedings involving data or analysis, and to assist in firm and in-house management, including billing, case forecasting, process improvement, resource management and financial operations. Students will review real world use cases including those involving prediction, risk management and operations. Students will also explore how to communicate data driven insights to a non-technical audience through visualization and user interfaces.
Legal Process Automation
Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Daniel Katz
This short module explores the history of process automation from its early origins in the world of manufacturing to the more modern applications in knowledge work. Students will be given exposure to key concepts such as process mapping, robotic process automation (RPA), and the implications of automation in legal practice. Students will see examples of how organizations have streamlined operations, improved efficiency, and reduced costs while maintaining or increasing the quality of outputs. Overall, the purpose of this module is to highlight the role of process to the broader integration of technology into legal workflows.
Legal Operations
This course will focus on the non-obvious opportunities and obstacles in transforming legal service delivery: shifts in legal market economics, structural trends, technology project management, and the painful politics of change management.
Legal Tech in Dispute Resolution
Lecturer: Dr. Jenni Hakkarainen
In this module the participants will analyse the various ways in which technology affects dispute resolution. First, technology shapes the work done in courts. Second, technology enables the use of different dispute resolution models, outside traditional court houses and nation states. Third, disputes originating from the use of technology often challenge traditional access to justice mechanisms. Students will be introduced to key concepts, methods and theories as well as presented with up-to-date use cases and regulatory frames to understand the role of technology in dispute resolution.
Supplemental Lectures Details
Kickoff Lecture: Legislative Data Visualization
Lecturer: Dr. Valérie M. Saintot, LLM
The lecture on Legislative Data Visualization covers a generous scope of questions. It sets the scene for a fundamental and ethical rethink of the practice of the law. It combines the big challenges of our times, technological and environmental, and is meant to provoke participants to critically think about how they want to contribute personally and collectively. In this lecture, concrete examples and use cases are shared. A key plea is to promote the need for legal professionals to use not only texts and words in their work but also quantitative data and visuals to power up their analysis, collaboration, and impact in their varied outputs.
Legal Tech - The View from Silicon Valley - Online
This session provides an overview of how technology and AI are reshaping the legal field. Topics include the use of technology in legal research, document drafting, and compliance, as well as the challenges and opportunities these innovations present. You will gain insight into the key trends and tools driving change in the legal profession.
Legal Markets & Regulation
Legal tech” and the resulting technical solutions and business models are regulated very differently in different jurisdictions. These laws regulate what lawyers can and cannot do when providing legal services. In the course, participants will explore different approaches to regulating the changing legal landscape and discuss its impact on the technology ecosystem of law firms, alternative legal service providers and legal technology companies in both the B2B and B2C sectors. This will be combined with the question of how to ensure effective access to justice for those seeking legal advice.”
Generative AI & Copyright Law
Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Linda Kuschel
In this course, we will cover several questions that generative AI poses for copyright law – extending from the potential protection for artificially generated content to the usage of vast amounts of (copyright-protected) data for training purposes.
Copyright lawyers have discussed whether “works” not created by humans can be afforded IP protection at least since 2018, when the painting “Edmond de Belamy” created by a generative adversarial network was auctioned at Christie’s for US$432,500. We will begin exploring the issue by establishing the legal framework applicable to generative AI in the European Union and its implications for general copyright law.
Then, we will turn to the concept of human authorship, and discuss how it may be interpreted to allow for copyright protection of AI-generated works. But even when it looks and feels almost like the original, debate remains on whether artificially generated content can, or indeed should, substitute works created by human authors and artists.
We will also examine whether, or rather, under which circumstances content created by AI infringes upon the preexisting copyrights of others. As we will see, generated content may turn out to be very similar to the works it has been trained on. Moreover, since generative AI is developed and applied in a series of distinct steps (e.g. model creation, pre-training, fine-tuning, prompting), it is not always clear who will (or should) be responsible for the algorithm’s copyright infringement. This is the case particularly when users engineer prompts to circumvent protections programmed into the algorithms.
Lastly, we will take a closer look at generative AI’s training process. Much of the data used for training AI algorithms is copyright-protected content (freely) available online – rightsholders are not asked for permission, nor are they compensated. Therefore, they have begun suing AI companies globally for purported copyright infringements. We will discuss some ongoing court battles in the US and Europe and examine their relevant legal framework, i.e., the fair use clause in US copyright law and the exception for text and data mining in European legislation. We will also turn to the question of how training AI on copyrighted works legally is possible in a situation where most of the works available online have already been fed into the algorithm.
Pre-Hackathon Workshops
Participants will actively develop innovative solutions for the legal market during a two-day hackathon in the third week of the program. To help teams refine their ideas and turn them into actionable projects, two workshops with an experienced coach will be offered prior to the hackathon. These sessions are designed to enable participants to identify potential use cases for the legal market, overcome complex challenges, collaborate effectively and apply legal technology in a practical and impactful way.
Online Dispute Resolution and Public Justice Reform - Online
Online dispute resolution (ODR) leverages technology and human-centred design to fundamentally re-orient the justice system around the needs of the public. Building on the example of the Civil Resolution Tribunal, the world's first public ODR body, as well initiatives from other countries, this practical session will look at how to use agile development principles, data, and user-centricity to reform and re-design public justice system processes for a modern world. We will also examine how lawyers can both drive and benefit from public justice reform.
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