By Gwyneth K. Shaw
Kiyan Mohebbizadeh ’26 arrived at UC Berkeley Law thinking he’d focus on the fast-growing artificial intelligence (AI) sector. But a phone call from a friend during orientation week pushed him to co-found a startup and toward earning an MBA alongside his J.D.
That detour also led him to victory in Paul Hastings’ recent first-ever “hackathon” for law students, alongside friends from the University of Chicago and Georgetown Law.
“He called me and said, ‘Hey, I’ve been working on a startup where we want to issue corporate bonds on public blockchains in the EU and I need some help,’” Mohebbizadeh says. “So I went through the first year and a half of law school working on this digital securities legal tech startup. And in that process, I got in touch with a lot of lawyers in the crypto community.”
Coming back for his 2L year, Mohebbizadeh heard about the Paul Hastings fintech crypto legal hackathon, which challenged students to identify a regulatory problem in the area, then create a potential solution. Mohebbizadeh teamed up with Chicago student Yi Qu, who spent her 1L year at UC Berkeley Law, and Georgetown student Joey Yu.
At the forefront of fintech innovation
Students handed in a 10-page paper ahead of the event, gave a 10-minute presentation to the firm’s fintech lawyers, then parried another 10 minutes of questions. Mohebbizadeh’s team chose to imagine reinventing stock ownership and trading by moving them to the blockchain.
“Part of our paper was about what it would look like to tokenize a traditional stock or security and present them as a digital token, rather than a certificate or a centralized ledger. We analyzed the processes you could use today, based on the legal structuring that’s available,” he says. “The other half was the policy side of things — the steps needed to enable a digital financial market.”
The idea of tokenizing securities is “very trendy in the crypto space right now,” Mohebbizadeh says. A lot of the questions his team faced focused on the broad implications and whether there was genuinely something for investors to gain from digitizing their holdings.
At a dinner after the winner was announced, Mohebbizadeh says, firm lawyers praised his team’s emphasis on the legal structure of their proposal.
“I think they appreciated that we really got down to a deep, detailed layer, and then also incorporated the broader policy implications,” he says.
Using blockchain technology for securities allows them to interact or transact directly with one another, rather than using third parties like brokers, Mohebbizadeh adds. In the current system, each intermediary takes a cut as the asset passes from the original issuing institution to the retail investor holding the actual stock. Using blockchain would increase transparency by allowing an investor to trace an asset in real time rather than relying on a contractual relationship.
“You don’t actually own your stocks when you buy a stock from Charles Schwab. Schwab owns a lot of stock, and says they own some for you,” Mohebbizadeh says. “Our policy proposal was to shift financial market infrastructure to be on the blockchain, so that each asset is represented by a token. And that token is what you take the court to settle disputes, that’s what you trade, that’s what the issuers deal with, that’s what the intermediaries deal with, and that’s what the retail investors deal with. Ideally, everything is on the blockchain.”
A broader horizon
Mohebbizadeh’s experience working on the startup prompted him to apply to UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, as part of the law school’s concurrent degree program.
“I’m a very entrepreneurial person, and I feel like the business school is a great place to interact with the startup ecosystem,” he says. “I’m very interested in the intersection between law, technology, business, and finance. And the MBA with the J.D. will really let me do all of that.”
He remains interested in AI and is working on research in that area now. After earning a master’s degree in data science at Columbia, UC Berkeley Law beckoned not just because of its top-notch technology law offerings, but other high-profile hubs across the campus, including the Center for Human-Compatible AI.
“I’m reintegrating with the AI space a bit more and researching some of the legal problems posed by AI adoption,” Mohebbizadeh says.
One of those areas involves so-called AI agents — software programs powered by large language models that can interact with people, take in information, and make an autonomous decision. Mohebbizadeh is focused not on the intellectual property involved, but the question of who’s responsible for the agent’s actions.
“One of the classic examples that’s being discussed right now is you type to an AI agent, ‘I want 10 bananas, and order them as soon as possible.’ And then 10 bundles of bananas — 100 pounds of bananas — show up at your door,” Mohebbizadeh says. “Is it the grocery store’s problem for not checking if you wanted 100 pounds of bananas? Is it the AI agent’s problem, or is it your problem for not verifying it?
“How can you assign agency to a piece of software, and the liability that’s involved with that?”
One model is that the AI agent is treated like an employee for legal purposes, another is that the agent is more like a contractor, with limited liability. Or one could argue the agent is a piece of software and you can’t assign liability to it. As he moves into his MBA courses and then finishes his law studies, Mohebbizadeh is eager to dig into these complexities.
“Startups have to decide how integrated they want to be on a legal level, and if they want to assume some of that liability themselves,” he says. “There’s a whole array of problems that come with that, and solutions that are technical and legal.”