Law and Technology

Every technologist now makes decisions with legal weight. 

The license you choose for a dependency, the data your model trains on, the words in a terms-of-service click-through, the way you disclose a breach — each carries consequences that surface long after the code ships. Law and Technology is a three-day MIT Professional Education course that gives engineers, product leaders, founders, and in-house counsel a working command of that legal landscape. Taught by MIT instructors and experienced technologists, the course is built around the situations technologists actually face. You will not memorize statutes. 

You will learn to recognize legal risk early, ask the right questions, document decisions defensibly, and partner productively with legal teams — so that law becomes a design input rather than a late-stage obstacle. The course is offered on MIT's campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts and in a live online format. Participants who complete it receive an MIT Professional Education Certificate of Completion and earn 2.4 Continuing Education Units (CEUs). 

Why study Law and Technology at MIT?

• Learn from MIT faculty and practicing technology lawyers who translate legal doctrine into engineering and product terms.
• Work through real scenarios, open-source compliance, model training data, privacy-by-design, breach response not abstract case law.
• Join a cohort that mixes engineers, product leaders, founders, and in-house counsel, so you learn the law and how the other side thinks.
• Leave with reusable frameworks for scoping legal review, assessing vendor risk, and documenting decisions defensibly.
• Earn a credential from MIT Professional Education, which has served technical professionals globally for more than 75 years. 

Key takeaways and benefits 

• A practical mental model of how IP, privacy, AI, and security law apply to technology work.
• Frameworks you can reuse immediately to triage legal risk and scope legal review.
• An MIT Professional Education Certificate of Completion and 2.4 CEUs.
• A 15% discount on future MIT Professional Education Short Programs and Digital Plus Programs courses.
• Membership in the MIT Professional Education LinkedIn community and ongoing updates on faculty research and new programs.

What You'll Learn

By the end of the course, participants will be able to: 

• Identify the intellectual property, contract, privacy, and security issues embedded in a product or engineering decision.
• Evaluate open-source licenses and explain the obligations they create for proprietary software.
• Apply core data privacy requirements, including GDPR and CCPA/CPRA, data collection, processing, and product design.
• Assess how AI-specific regulation, including the EU AI Act, applies to models and automated decision systems.
• Respond to a security incident in line with breach-notification law and recognized compliance frameworks.
• Scope legal review efficiently and communicate with counsel in a way that speeds decisions rather than slows them.

Law and Technology is designed for professionals whose work has legal consequences but who have no formal legal training, as well as legal professionals who want a stronger technical foundation. 

It is a strong fit for: 

• Software engineers, data scientists, and ML engineers who want to understand IP, licensing, and data law.
• Product and engineering managers who own decisions about features, data, and third-party components.
• Startup founders and technical executives responsible for risk, fundraising diligence, and compliance.
• In-house counsel, compliance, and privacy professionals who want to speak the language of engineering teams. No legal background is required, and there are no prerequisites.