When Emily Cabrera, B.A. ’12, J.D. ’18, entered the HeyCounsel Claude Cowork Hackathon, she had only been building with artificial intelligence for two months. She didn’t have a formal computer science background, but she had a distinct advantage: a decade of legal intuition.
Cabrera, currently Legal Counsel at IRG Ventures LLC, recognized a critical vulnerability in how the legal industry approaches AI risk. While most conversations focus on reviewing outputs or adding disclaimers, Cabrera realized that for attorney-client privilege, the danger occurs much earlier.
"The dangerous moment is before the prompt leaves the lawyer's machine," Cabrera explains. "Privilege Sentinel became very obvious to me. It had to be a pre-flight checker... something that helps a lawyer pause before the risky disclosure happens."
Winning a hackathon for legal workflows
She was a winner at the April 2026 collaborative, five-hour event where hundreds of lawyers from over 10 countries used Anthropic's Claude Cowork and Claude Code to build practical, open-source AI tools specifically designed for legal workflows.
Her creation and hackathon winner, Privilege Sentinel, was quickly integrated into open-source legal skills ecosystems such as Lawvable and LegalQuants. When Anthropic later highlighted these community hubs during its "Claude for the Legal Industry" rollout, Cabrera's weekend project was officially validated on a global scale.
For Cabrera, the learning curve wasn’t about memorizing code syntax but translating legal judgment into system architecture.
"Building with AI is much closer to drafting than people think," she says. "You need precision. You need definitions. You need to anticipate edge cases. Lawyers are already trained for that. I just had to learn to aim that training at a different kind of document."
The roots of innovation at Miami Law
Cabrera's path to the cutting edge of legal tech began at the University of Miami School of Law. She credits her forward-thinking approach to two specific experiences: Law Without Walls (LWOW) with Professor Michele DeStefano, and intellectual property with Professor Andres Sawicki.
"Law Without Walls…was the first time I understood that law could be a design discipline," Cabrera says. "Look at a problem in the world, assemble an unconventional team, and build a better way to solve it."
Meanwhile, Sawicki’s IP class taught her to ask the foundational question she still uses today when advising venture-backed and AI-enabled companies: "Who owns the value, and why?"
"What is meaningful now is that those Miami Law relationships have not stayed in the past,” says Cabrera. “Professor Sawicki recently connected me with Professor Or Cohen Sasson and the Miami Law & AI Lab, and Professor DeStefano's work continues to sit at the center of the legal innovation conversation I find myself in now. So, it feels less like I left Miami Law and more like I am finding my way back to the version of lawyering it first showed me."
Advice for the next generation
As AI continues to reshape the legal landscape, Cabrera urges current law students not to sit on the sidelines or wait for permission.
"Build something small before you feel ready," Cabrera advises. "Pick a legal problem you actually care about. Not 'AI and law' in the abstract—something narrow and irritating and real…Build the smallest possible tool that improves that one thing."
Ultimately, Cabrera believes the future belongs to lawyers who develop a strong thesis on technology rather than just passive user skills. She is already applying her own thesis to her next open-source project, Counterweight, which analyzes contract risk through bargaining-power asymmetry.
By bridging the gap between deep legal doctrine and operational systems design, Cabrera is helping ensure that lawyers remain the architects of their own profession. "The next generation of legal tools should not be built around lawyers," Cabrera said. "Lawyers should be building them."
Read more about the School of Law’s technology law area of study.
