CLE - Tech Law Boot Camp 2026: AI Chatbots - Negligence and the Mental Health Harms

CIPLIT’s Tech Law Boot Camp is an annual series of lunchtime lectures about relevant substantive technology topics. These lectures are open to DePaul law students, alumni and the Chicago legal community. 2026's Tech Law Boot Camp will focus on the use of AI in Industries. All events will run from 12:00-1:00 pm in person and over Zoom (RSVP for the link). "Negligence by Design and the Mental Health Harms of AI Chatbots" with Lynette Martins, Jaharis Faculty Fellow at DePaul Law will be held on SEPTEMBER 15, 2026, from 12-1 pm in LEWIS 803. 1 hour CLE will be provided for all requesting attendees. Lunch will be provided for in person attendees. This event is free to attend. RSVP to bdavinge@depaul.edu with how you plan to attend and your ARDC #, if applicable. Description: In the United States, scarce clinical mental health care and accessible AI chatbots are colliding into a public health crisis. Available at any hour and engineered to remember, to attend, and to profess friendship, these systems are where millions of lonely people, many of them minors, now turn. Some arrive seeking medical advice. Others arrive seeking company, and the systems are engineered to convert that loneliness into engagement. The resulting injuries are clinical in shape: emotional dependency, deepening distress, reinforced delusion, and, in the gravest instances, suicide. Lynette Martin's new article, Negligence by Design and the Mental Health Harms of AI Chatbots, makes two claims. First, the accountability gap is illusory. Ordinary negligence already reaches these manufacturers, because anthropomorphic design is what makes the harm foreseeable: a system built to be experienced as a person is built to be trusted as one. An emerging literature converges on negligence but divides over what negligence should measure. My answer is that for relational products, fault lives in the relationship the defendant manufactured, a structure of mental health law has been instrumental in shaping. Second, liability operates only after the harm, and mass-harm litigation teaches that compensation deferred is prevention forfeited. So, the article opens a normative dialogue on process integrity: embedding the duty of care into these systems' design, training, and deployment while they remain soft enough to shape. AI chatbot harm is not a new problem awaiting new doctrine. It is precisely what negligence was intended to address. Bio: Lynette Martins joined DePaul Law in 2025 as a Jaharis Faculty Fellow. Her scholarship explores the intersection of law, health policy and bioethics; health justice and equity; and global health security, and her recent and forthcoming scholarship appears in the Texas Environmental Law Journal, Hastings Center Report, Tulsa Law Review, Medical Law International and Pace Law Review. Professor Martins most recently taught Public Health Law and The Patient-Clinician Relationship (Bioethics) as an adjunct assistant professor at New York Medical College. She also is a Global Institute of Human Rights Scholar with the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School; currently serves as co-chair of the immigration and bioethics affinity group of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities; and is the project lead for an NIH-funded Parkinson’s Disease initiative in The Bahamas. Previously, she served as a senior research fellow at the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy and an associate research scholar at Yale Law School, where she was a member of the clinical ethics committee at Yale New Haven Hospital. She also worked as a research assistant at Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. Professor Martins holds an LLM, with distinction, from Georgetown University and a master of bioethics, magna cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a postgraduate diploma in population health evidence from the University of Manchester and a law degree from the University of Huddersfield, both in the UK. Full Schedule All events run from 12-1 pm in Lewis 803 or online. RSVP for the link. September 15, 2026: "AI Chatbots - Negligence and the Mental Health Harm" with Lynette Martins (DePaul Law, Jaharis Faculty Fellow)October 13, 2026: "AI and Emerging Technology for Lawyers" with Colin Black (Wilson Sonsini) (Ethics CLE tentatively available)October 22, 2026: "AI In Patent Searching" with Ron Kaminecki (Kaminecki IP, LLC)