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Spencer Williams

Spencer Williams

Associate Professor of Law

Phone
(619) 525-1681
Department
Faculty

Biography

Professor Spencer Williams teaches and researches at the intersection of business law and innovation. He writes on topics including artificial intelligence, legal automation, smart contracts, complex transactions, venture capital, and entrepreneurship. His research draws on interdisciplinary theories such as complexity theory and network science and employs a variety of quantitative empirical methods. Early in his career, Professor Williams practiced corporate and securities law at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Silicon Valley where he represented a wide range of technology companies and venture capital firms. He received a JD from Stanford Law School and a BS from MIT.

  • J.D Stanford Law School
  • B.S. MIT
  • Contracts
  • Business Organizations

Visit Professor Williams SSRN Author Page

Law Review Publications

  • Layered Alignment, work in progress
  • Generative Contracts, ARIZONA STATE LAW JOURNAL (forthcoming 2024)
  • Contractual Complexity, DELAWARE JOURNAL OF CORPORATE LAW (forthcoming 2024)
  • Algorithmic Price Gouging in THE CAMBRIDGE HANDBOOK OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE LAW (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2024)
  • LegalBench: A Collaboratively Built Benchmark for Measuring Legal Reasoning in Large Language Models, co-authored with Guha et al., 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023)
  • Edge Contracts, 25 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA JOURNAL OF BUSINESS LAW 839 (2023)
  • Contract Maps, 91 UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-KANSAS CITY LAW REVIEW 343 (2022)
  • Contracts as Systems, 45 DELAWARE JOURNAL OF CORPORATE LAW 219 (2021)
  • Predictive Contracting, 2019 COLUMBIA BUSINESS LAW REVIEW 621
  • Venture Capital Contract Design: An Empirical Analysis of the Connection Between Bargaining Power and Venture Financing Contract Terms, 23 FORDHAM JOURNAL OF CORPORATE & FINANCIAL LAW 105 (2017)
    • Cited in Basho Technologies Holdco B LLC v. Georgetown Basho Investors LLC, C.A. No. 11802-VCL (Del. Ch. July 6, 2018)