UC San Diego Horizon x Techstars Startup Weekend: Justice + AI

about this event

UC San Diego's Design and Innovation Building hosts Techstars Startup Weekend San Diego, bringing builders, designers, lawyers, and the legally curious together for a weekend focused squarely on legal tech, software, and innovation. The theme: reimagining law for the AI era.

The legal industry touches nearly everyone and has changed less than almost any other sector in the last few decades — this weekend is about building the tools that could finally change that, from AI that helps a tenant fight an eviction to software that lets a small business draft a contract without a $400-an-hour phone call.

Around 100 participants will pitch ideas, form teams around the strongest ones, and spend the weekend building toward a final pitch to a panel of judges. Mentors and coaches work alongside teams throughout, helping them get out of the building to validate ideas with real users, sharpen product direction, and prepare a polished final pitch.

Julian Bryant, Lead Organizer of Techstars Startup Weekend San Diego and an attorney/software developer himself, has facilitated roughly 40 Startup Weekends and brings a track record of real companies launched from the format — including CreativeUp, a Santa Barbara-based company that formed at one of his earliest events and is still operating more than six years later.

Jacques Chirazi, Director of the Basement and Entrepreneurship Center at UC San Diego's Office of Innovation and Commercialization, brings UC San Diego's student entrepreneurship ecosystem into the weekend, connecting participants to campus resources that can carry momentum well past Sunday night.

This isn't just a competition — it's an entrepreneurial laboratory. Participants who've never attempted a startup get to try on different roles — founder, designer, engineer — and learn by doing what Julian calls "experiential education entrepreneurship," packed into three days.

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