The 2025 Grunin Center Conference on Law and Social Entrepreneurship took place at the NYU School of Law in early June, bringing together legal scholars, practicing attorneys, and fund managers for a series of panels exploring the evolving role of law in shaping business, finance, and innovation.

While the agenda spanned a wide range of technical and sectoral issues, from AI governance to polarization in legal negotiation, what tied the sessions together was a shared focus on complexity: how legal professionals can serve as navigators, interpreters, and builders within systems undergoing rapid transformation.

Amid the dense thicket of ideas and diverse professional vocabularies, the Grunin Conference offered moments of unexpected alignment. Each panel, though grounded in specific domains, seemed to reach toward a deeper question: how to act with integrity and foresight when certainty is rare, and perception itself is fragmented.

AI and community voice

A Grunin roundtable on AI, community voice, and governance brought together legal, corporate, and nonprofit leaders to examine how artificial intelligence is shaping the future of impact work.

The conversation focused on how generative AI tools, while efficient and powerful, often replicate structural blind spots due to their dependence on publicly available data, which is necessarily limited and often does not reflect underrepresented perspectives.

Speakers highlighted a deeper trust problem: the persuasive tone of generative AI can make outputs appear authoritative, even when inaccurate. For example, legal professionals warned that systems may hallucinate citations or fabricate case law when prompted imprecisely, an alarming prospect for students or social sector professionals seeking quick but trustworthy guidance.

This issue becomes more acute when AI is applied at scale, in fields like humanitarian aid, public health, or education, where a misleading result can have significant real-world consequences.

One finance associate noted that tools like ChatGPT are often optimized for simple, time-saving tasks (rewriting emails, answering basic queries) but the public is not adequately informed about their limitations in more complex or sensitive domains.

Without clear disclosure or transparency, AI risks delivering answers with unearned confidence, misleading users into applying flawed data in high-stakes contexts.

Still, the panel underscored that innovation and responsibility can coexist.

Many organizations are experimenting with localized AI models and privacy-preserving approaches, such as opt-out clauses, data siloing, and mission-specific platforms. Some are working on internal training programs and nonprofit-focused AI governance curricula to better equip teams with the frameworks needed to assess and implement AI responsibly.

Others emphasized the importance of legal due diligence: reviewing contracts with AI vendors to avoid inadvertently ceding control over data and outputs. The idea of “responsible AI by design” emerged as a key takeaway: a mindset that mirrors “privacy by design,” encouraging stakeholders to ask hard questions early, before tools are embedded in operational workflows.

Ultimately, the panel concluded that meaningful participation in AI development, from content governance to licensing models, will be essential to ensure that companies and communities are not just subjects of data extraction, but active agents in shaping the AI systems that may come to increasingly influence social outcomes.

Institutional risk amid cognitive polarization

At the Grunin Center’s recent panel on polarization and professional judgment, the discussion veered away from policy slogans and into subtler terrain: cognitive fragmentation.

Drawing from systems theory and psychology, panelists offered a sobering diagnosis: today’s most persistent professional challenge may not be disagreement over goals, but the absence of shared interpretive frames.

For lawyers, compliance officers, and risk managers alike, this creates a new kind of exposure: not operational failure, but narrative drift, where terms, intentions, and outcomes are filtered through increasingly divergent mental models.

A trained behavioral psychology specialist on the panel reframed polarization not as a moral or ideological problem, but as a pattern-forming system, with its own feedback loops and tipping points.

In this view, people do not necessarily react to a clause, policy, or rule—they react to what that clause represents in their personal narrative. Slight differences in context or tone can activate entirely different emotional responses.

Professionals who manage institutional risk must now learn to identify these cognitive triggers, mapping not just the formal components of a policy, but the perceptual cascades they may set off among stakeholders.

The panelists also added that once these cascades begin, they follow well-documented paths.

Research shows that in polarized contexts, individuals become more certain of their views in response to ambiguity, not less certain. This poses a particular challenge for those drafting compliance frameworks, codes of conduct, or internal guidance.

A rule meant to promote flexibility may be read as favoritism; a disclosure intended to ensure transparency may be interpreted as pretext. The solution is not to strip nuance but to engineer pause points: spaces for clarification, feedback, and reflection that slow down reactive interpretation and allow institutional memory to surface.

People do not necessarily react to a clause, policy, or rule—they react to what that clause represents in their personal narrative. Slight differences in context or tone can activate entirely different emotional responses.

Several legal practitioners noted that this shift is already visible in practice. General counsel are increasingly being called to mediate internal disagreement not over law, but over meaning, resolving tension between teams and employee groups who read the same sentence as carrying polar opposite meaning.

One described the use of “framing memos” not to persuade, but to offer parallel explanatory narratives for a decision, helping different departments approach the issue with empathy for other perspectives. Another emphasized the growing need for narrative auditing: checking not just whether procedures are followed, but whether institutional language is still legible to those it’s meant to guide.

The panel closed with a reminder that polarization is not resolved through agreement, but through better communication even if this reveals and results in disagreement. Because ensuring that different points of view are surfaced and discussed before opinions calcify and lead to conflict is critical.

In a fragmented world being aware of the existence of potentially diverging points of view, having the ability to hold space for the competing framing of problems, and still being able to guide parties toward shared outcomes could be advantageous in both the legal and the compliance context.