By Andrew Cohen
Lakshita Bhargava LL.M. ’26 traveled nearly 8,000 miles from her AI-focused work in India to Berkeley Law, but quickly felt right at home.
Working at the nexus of mathematics, technology, and law, she watched AI rapidly transform how knowledge is produced, decisions are made, and institutions function — creating complex challenges that extend beyond traditional notions of “legal injury” and require a deeper engagement with context and multidimensional analysis.
“Berkeley was the natural home for building such foundational knowledge,” says Bhargava, whose law firm work focuses on designing responsible frameworks, methodologies, and tools for ethical AI. “While the law school’s preeminence in technology is long-established, I was equally drawn to its unique position with immediate proximity to the companies building these technologies and the public institutions tasked with responding to them.”
Before joining Berkeley Law’s LL.M. Program, she had co-developed Kaabil.me, an AI-powered learning platform serving advanced tools for teachers, students, and institutes with the aim of making learning more equitable, accessible, and effective. Meeting classmate and European law expert Anže Erbežnik during her first couple weeks at Berkeley Law extended her focus to developing innovative strategies for legal workflows.
They arrived from opposite directions — Bhargava building AI products and advising on AI regulation and policy, Erbežnik a renowned scholar in European criminal procedure. They chose to focus on European Union (EU) administration-heavy terrain of mutual cooperation between member states in criminal proceedings.
Accelerating alignment
The European Arrest Warrant has most often demanded cross-border verification of procedural rights and other conditions with multilingual records under strict deadlines. The study Bhargava and Erbežnik developed outlines a blueprint for a rule-based, retrieval-augmented AI tool designed to support Croatian–Slovenian judicial cooperation by making assessments timely and consistent.
“It checks an incoming warrant, maps offenses across jurisdictions, monitors case law, and produces a fact-specific report that supports a judicial decision,” Bhargava explains.
Co-authored with University of Zagreb Professor Marin Bonačić, their study also generalizes for EU member states and is designed as a replicable template for building cooperation infrastructure across the EU to support cross-border enforcement.
The framework was presented in May at the 49th MIPRO Information and Communication Technology Law Convention, Croatia and published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers — a venue Bhargava describes as rare to have “lawyers and scientists in the same conversation.”
Because today’s law requires combining classical legal concepts with a real understanding of technology, Erbežnik highlights that while technologically a lot is possible, law must add the ethical dimension guiding how technology is used.
“Lakshita has mastered exactly that balance,” he says. “She moves fluently between doctrine and innovation, never losing sight of the values the law is meant to protect. Collaborating with her has been a real pleasure, and her insights consistently raised the quality of our work.”
Passion projects
Bhargava built Kaabil.me in India with her fiancé, CEO Shrey Gupta, around the belief that every student deserves individualized academic support. Education systems do not necessarily fit every student, she notes, and most students do not learn the same way or at the same pace as their peers.
“A student may struggle after class, hesitate to ask a question publicly, or need an idea explained differently,” Bhargava says. “Teachers, meanwhile, carry large classrooms, content preparation, assessment, and progress tracking. Between the support students need and the support institutions can realistically provide, there is a persistent gap. We built Kaabil to close it.”
Her role included identifying educational use cases, designing product strategy and objectives, and coordinating stakeholders. She also tested the platform in real-world settings and developed its responsible AI principles.
“Working on Kaabil made many abstract AI-policy questions concrete for me,” she says. “We had to consider not only whether a system was technically capable of producing an answer, but whether that answer and platform was objective, pedagogically appropriate, reliable, transparent, and beneficial to vulnerable or young users.”
The experience fueled her interest in innovation and responsible AI, providing a much broader understanding of AI businesses and products, and creating legal, policy, and innovation strategies on emerging technology. Her time at Berkeley Law, she says, has delivered “research, tools, and energy I could not have found anywhere else.”
“I can raise an idea as a legal question in one room, test its technical assumptions in another, and find people in both who enjoy and take such discussions seriously,” Bhargava says. “Much of my work here was never planned in advance; it began with a question, grew through conversation, and became possible because this community encouraged experimentation with kindness and passion.”