By Andrew Cohen
Growing up, 3L Alex Belkin saw his father and grandfather work tirelessly to build up a business to support his family. Watching them persevere through ups and downs taught him the value of hard work, grit, and the sacrifices it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur.
“I’ve also really craved adventure and novelty from an early age,” he says. “I feel like there’s nothing more exhilarating professionally than starting and growing a project, organization, or business.”
True to form, Belkin launched two cutting-edge student groups — Blockchain & Law at Berkeley and AI @ Berkeley Law. While working at a blockchain startup right after college, he saw how a foundational understanding of blockchain technology was important for lawyers because of its rapidly growing influence in critical sectors including finance, identity verification, and cybersecurity.
“The industry was operating in a legally uncertain environment, and I quickly came to realize the outsized role lawyers, judges, and policymakers played in shaping the sector, which I found very captivating,” he says. “I also really admired how much of an impact the general counsel of our company had in the growth and trajectory of the company.”
A few weeks into his first semester, he began messaging people in class group chats and connecting with other students interested in learning about blockchain. In short order, they decided to create Blockchain & Law at Berkeley from scratch — which started small with hosting meetings and recruiting members but steadily grew into a strong community with a robust series of events and projects hosted in and outside the law school.
“As AI-enabled deep fakes, misinformation, and cybercrimes continue to intensify, blockchain will continue to grow in value and adoption, as blockchain-based cryptographic systems are, at least as far as we know of today, the most reliable and secure way to transact and establish identity and proof of ownership in an increasingly digital world,” Belkin says.
Riding the AI wave
With AI use and variation accelerating at warp speed, Belkin also founded AI @ Berkeley Law, which strives to raise awareness about artificial intelligence and the AI industry. The group also works to educate others about relevant legal, policy, and regulatory issues, including through speaker events, publications, and other channels.
Its programming mostly consists of lunch talks that are styled as fireside chats and panel discussions, which the group occasionally co-hosts with other student organizations such as the Berkeley Business Law Journal, Women in Tech Law, and Privacy Law at Berkeley.
Speakers have included senior lawyers working at some of the world’s largest AI companies, founders and CEOs of leading legal AI startups, policy experts, and experienced consumer and civil rights advocates. AI @ Berkeley Law also partners with other schools on campus, on events such as Haas School of Business’s annual Tech & AI Summit.
In terms of his leadership approach, Belkin is a consistent advocate of distributed ownership, agility, and full accountability from day one. During AI @ Berkeley Law’s first-ever meeting, he told all the board members to see themselves as “a startup within a startup” with no limit on how much creativity and energy they could bring to each part of the organization.
“I strongly believe in empowering board members to take full responsibility for their respective roles, which allows us to move fast and execute at a high level without bottlenecks,” he says. “I try not to micromanage and focus on fostering a culture where everyone feels like they own a piece of the organization’s success and can speak their mind freely as needed.”
Belkin had gained valuable leadership insights as an undergrad at Columbia, where founded a student-run college consulting company that offered a peer-to-peer mentoring service connecting prospective applicants to current college students. At its height, it spanned five universities and had 11 college student contract workers, with Belkin connecting employees with clients, engaging in social media marketing campaigns, and creating the company website and related materials.
“It’s rare to encounter young professionals with both a business and legal mindset, and rarer still to see that in someone who hadn’t yet entered law school,” says Collin Woodward, who supervised Belkin as general counsel of a fast-growing tech startup in 2021. “During his time with us, he consistently approached legal issues through a business-first lens, and eventually expanded his impact to help shape the company’s sales and partnership strategies as well. His drive, curiosity, and business and legal intuition are an uncommon combination.”
Optimal environment
Applying to law school with the intention of working in-house for an innovative tech startup after graduation, Belkin says he chose Berkeley Law “because it has the best technology and business law programs in the country, and is housed within the largest university startup ecosystem in the world that is located at the doorstep of Silicon Valley.”
When asked about the most difficult part of managing the two student organizations he launched, Belkin says that coordinating students’ schedules has been the greatest challenge. Still, he credits how willing Berkeley Law students are to collaborate once they’re engaged.
Belkin worries about certain misconceptions about AI, including people viewing generative AI as just another type of software technology. From his perspective, developing generative AI models is “more akin to growing an intelligent alien species than writing code.”
“To this day no one, not even the top AI researchers and scientists,can fully explain how and why their models think and behave the way they do,” Belkin says. “This misunderstanding leads to significant blind spots, as lawyers and policymakers are trying to shoehorn this new technological paradigm into existing legal and regulatory frameworks that don’t quite fit. While most lawyers know that IP and copyright are currently under siege, few grasp the fundamental difference in how this technology operates compared to any previous software products.”
After graduating, Belkin plans to work at a legal AI startup and focus on a business and operations role.
With legal AI taking off just as his law school experience began, he says, “I feel like this is a uniquely rare moment in time when I can directly participate in bringing about a new era for the legal industry.”