In the field of corporate law, artificial intelligence can quickly complete some tasks that might take an attorney hours to perform, saving clients money and drastically altering the way law firms operate.

“AI suddenly allows clients themselves to generate initial drafts of contracts in moments and revise the contracts immediately with follow-up questions,” said Jack Wroldsen, an associate professor of accounting and law and a former corporate attorney. “Will clients still need to rely on large corporate law firms when they can create so much work product so quickly themselves?”

That’s one of the questions Wroldsen and two students have posed in their Summer Undergraduate Research Project (SURP). A separate SURP project looks at how AI will change the workplace.

“Rather than trying to predict which entire occupations or roles will disappear, I think it is more useful to talk about the parts of work that continue to depend heavily on people,” said Alexa Loken, a business and communications lecturer who also founded Loken Careers, a career coaching firm. 

Held across campus every summer, SURP pairs faculty mentors with students to conduct relevant industry research. Results are displayed every fall during the SURP Symposium. 

As AI continues to have a significant impact on the business community, the Orfalea College SURP projects reflect that shift, with seven of this year’s 24 projects related AI. 

“Faculty have seen AI impact their work in the classroom and on their research, and I think SURP gives them another opportunity to explore the benefits and challenges inherent in AI,” said Bruce Greenbaum, associate dean for programs and learning.  “In addition, students are facing ever-changing environments both in school and once they enter the workforce with regard to AI and its impact on their work. I think this mutual interest certainly drove up the volume of SURP projects addressing AI in some way.”

Orfalea College has already been pro-active with regard to AI, creating Cal Poly’s first AI faculty fellow.

That fellow, Leida Chen, said this year’s SURP reflects how AI has become part of the growing academic culture in the college.

“It suggests that faculty and students are moving beyond simply experimenting with AI tools and are beginning to ask deeper questions about how AI affects learning, decision-making, business practices and society,” said Chen, who is also a professor of information systems.

Chen’s SURP project explores AI literacy among students, with the goal of possibly crafting a publication based on the research. Other AI SURPs explore deep fakes in Hollywood, data centers and an asynchronous accounting class.

At the college, Greenbaum said, faculty have a wide berth to propose SURP projects.

“Our primary objective is to identify projects that will give students meaningful exposure and experience to the academic research process,” he said. “While each project may ask students to perform different tasks -- from reviewing past literature in order to gain a better understanding of the current knowledge base of a topic; to data collection and cleaning to support initial analysis; to performing data analysis and generating preliminary results -- the goal is to immerse students in the research process.”

"Faculty and students are moving beyond simply experimenting with AI tools and are beginning to ask deeper questions about how AI affects learning, decision-making, business practices and society,”

                                                       -- Leida Chen, AI Faculty Fellow

Loken’s project explores a major concern regarding AI: How will it impact jobs? The good news is that robots will not replace us.

“Work involving judgment, ethical decision-making, trust, leadership, relationship-building, creativity and navigating ambiguity will remain very human,” she said. “AI can generate and summarize info quickly, but people still need to ask new questions, understand context, make consequential decisions and take responsibility for the outcome. Research, healthcare, education, entrepreneurship and leadership are all likely to change significantly because of AI, but their most human aspects will remain essential.”

That reflects what is currently happening in corporate law, Wroldsen said.

“AI does not immediately threaten sophisticated legal advice that takes account of multi-layered context, individual, political and economic circumstances, personal traits and a host of other situational characteristics in which judgment is prized,” he said. “That is, we still want the guidance of a trusted, experienced counselor when facing make-or-break decisions in business as in life.”

However, more routine tasks, such as contract review, can be handled by AI, and now there are many organizations that offer that service – with more to come -- said Trenton Counter, one of two students working with Wroldsen. 

“Firms are deciding whether to rent these tools or build their own, and some are spending real money to build them,” said Counter, a financial management student. “The largest corporate law firm in the world, Kirkland & Ellis, reportedly put around $500 million into an in-house system with Palantir. Their bet is that decades of their own work product are worth more as something they own than as fuel for a tool their competitors are also renting."

The growing inclusion in corporate law could impact the number of attorney jobs and how lawyers are trained. Yet, while AI can save clients money and give them more control, increased AI comes with cautionary tales.

"Perhaps one of the most notable drawbacks are ‘AI hallucinations,’ which is where AI spits out a fact that is either false or not to the fullest extent truthful,” said Liliana Wiethake, a finance student working with Wroldsen. “Even some of the most used AI services, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, only meet a threshold that is accurate around 62-88% of the time for tasks concerning law services."

Despite its limitations, AI is here to stay, and universities nationwide are trying to keep pace with the rapid evolution. Chen’s project, for example, is one of two that looks at how it has become integrated into coursework at Cal Poly.

“How faculty incorporate AI into courses matters,” he said. “Structured, purposeful learning activities can help students understand what AI can and cannot do, how to evaluate its outputs and how to use it responsibly. As students become more knowledgeable and confident, they may be more willing to use AI productively rather than avoid it, misuse it or rely on it uncritically.”

Top photo: Leida Chen teaches a class at the Orfalea College of Business. Chen, who is the college's faculty fellow for AI, is conducting research that explores how AI is being integrated into classrooms. (Photo: Jahan Ramezani)

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