New Voices at USF Law: Associate Professor Alexandria Serra

The daughter of a Puerto Rican father born in Ponce, Serra was the first in her family to graduate from college, and then from law school. A nationally competitive speech and debate student during her college years, she attended night law school at Southern Methodist University while working at a patent law firm during the day. Navigating professional school without a family roadmap wasn't easy. Her family was proud and supportive, she says, but couldn’t provide her much guidance.

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After graduating and practicing patent law briefly, she realized she wanted to be in the courtroom instead. “I said, ‘All right, patents are not for me.” Serra went on to work as a public defender in El Paso, Texas, before building her own criminal defense practice, where she began experimenting with technology to better serve clients and manage a high-volume caseload.

“I built an app where clients could snap a picture of their ticket and hire me automatically,” she said. The app was designed to dismantle the barriers that keep ordinary people from accessing legal help: the time off work, the unfamiliar courthouse, the anxiety of navigating a system that was not built with them in mind.

That early interest in technology as a tool for access to justice eventually shaped her teaching and scholarship. While teaching advocacy courses and coaching mock trial teams, Serra began developing AI-powered tools that allow students to practice oral arguments, objections, crossexaminations, and client counseling exercises.

“I thought, how do I serve more students in a better way?” she said. “We are limited in our capacity by the hours in which we can dedicate to teaching and coaching. AI is not.” It is the repeatable, scalable, accessible aspects of these technologies that prove invaluable.

Today, her work focuses not only on how AI can improve legal training, but also on the harder questions where the rights of the accused are concerned. Her scholarship sits at the intersection of AI and constitutional criminal procedure, examining how AI is reshaping the criminal justice system.

For lawyers thinking of leveraging AI, the key, she observes, is separating machine tasks and human tasks. “Lawyers have been doing too many machine tasks for too long,” she said. “If we can leverage AI to operate at the top of our licenses, meaning delegating those tasks to AI, the lawyer work, like strategy, judgment, problem-solving, is going to turn out better for lawyers and their clients.”

That combination of innovation and advocacy made USF Law a natural fit. “I was looking at the website and a phrase popped out at me: ‘justice warrior,’” she said. “That embodied what I was as a public defender and defense attorney.”

For Serra, teaching ultimately became a way to multiply her impact. “How do I serve the most people?” she recalled asking herself while waiting through a crowded court docket. The answer: train lawyers who understand what is actually at stake for the people trapped in the criminal justice system. “I spent nearly a decade fighting for people one at a time. Teaching is how I fight for thousands.”