Potter Law

Potter Law Education law practice focused on Title IX, Section 504, and student conduct matters.

Potter Law represents students and families and also provides training, policy support, and neutral services for schools, colleges, and nonprofits.

05/28/2026

The thing that comes up every time I talk to other parents isn't whether their kids are using AI. It's how a student who didn't use it can prove that.

The burden has quietly shifted. Schools used to have to show a student cheated. Now students are the ones explaining how their work got made, often weeks after they turned it in, often with nothing to point to.

The students who clear these cases fast all have one thing in common: a trail. Drafts, version history, a record of the work happening. The ones who can't show it are the ones still dealing with allegations a month later.

If your student is heading into finals or summer classes, the habit to build now is simple. And it protects the kid who never cheated in the first place.

I write the longer version of these — the actual steps, the part that doesn’t fit in a reel — on my Substack. Free, and it goes straight to your inbox. Link in the first comment.

05/22/2026

The same study group your college student was in last semester may be a violation in their next class. Different professors have different syllabi and different rules. What was allowed in one class can get a student into real trouble in another.
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The move is to read each syllabus carefully at the start of every semester. Ask the professor when something isn’t clear. Don’t assume what worked last semester is going to work this one.
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This is one of the most common reasons students who weren’t trying to cheat end up in academic integrity meetings.
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Educational information, not legal advice. Share with another parent of a college student if it’s useful.

I write the longer version of these — the actual steps, the part that doesn’t fit in a reel — on my Substack. Free, and it goes straight to your inbox. Link in the first comment.

05/21/2026

If your college student is a high achiever who’s never been in trouble, they’re not immune from academic integrity issues. It’s almost always because they were overwhelmed, behind, and terrified of turning in work that wasn’t good enough. So they made one bad decision. And because they’d never been in trouble before, they assumed the school would understand.
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Sometimes the school does understand. Sometimes it does not.
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The safer move is earlier. If your student is behind on something, the move is to email the instructor before the deadline. Say they’re behind. Ask what options exist. Ask what help is permitted.
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If they’ve already missed the deadline, the move is to email anyway. Don’t wait until they’re trying to explain it in an academic integrity violation meeting.
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Educational information, not legal advice. Share with another parent of a college student if it’s useful.

I write the longer version of these — the actual steps, the part that doesn’t fit in a reel — on my Substack. Free, and it goes straight to your inbox. Link in the first comment.

05/17/2026

I’m at a conference in Colorado this weekend with about 100 attorney moms whose kids are in college. Almost every conversation eventually comes back to academic integrity. The pattern I keep hearing isn’t about kids who cheated. It’s about kids who didn’t cheat but are spending weeks trying to prove it.
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The detection tools aren’t reliable, and the burden has quietly shifted to the student to demonstrate they wrote what they wrote. The students who clear these cases fastest are the ones whose document version history, search history, and notes survive the assignment. The ones spending weeks in a process are the ones who composed in the submission box and deleted their drafts when they were done.
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If your student is in college, the habit to build now is simple. Write in Google Docs or Word, not in the LMS. Keep search history on while working. Don’t delete drafts and notes. Read each course’s specific AI and collaboration policy before the first assignment. If they used AI for anything, even grammar checking, write down what and when.
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The students with the trail walk out of these cases fine. The ones without it spend weeks trying to prove a negative.
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Educational information, not legal advice. Share with another parent if you think it would help.

I write the longer version of these — the actual steps, the part that doesn’t fit in a reel — on my Substack. Free, and it goes straight to your inbox. Link in the first comment.

05/15/2026

If your college student gets an email from a professor saying “could you stop by for office hours, I want to talk about your assignment” — that email is usually not what it looks like.
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By the time the student gets the email, the professor has already filed a report. The academic integrity office has already opened a case. The Monday meeting isn’t an office visit. It’s a formal step in a process. Whatever the student says becomes part of the record.
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Students who do better in these cases aren’t the ones with the strongest defenses. They’re the ones who understood before they walked in what kind of meeting it was.
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If your student gets one of these emails, the answer isn’t to panic. It’s to slow down and ask questions before walking in.
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General educational information, not legal advice. Share with another parent of a college student if it’s useful.

I write the longer version of these — the actual steps, the part that doesn’t fit in a reel — on my Substack. Free, and it goes straight to your inbox. Link in the first comment.

05/13/2026

Here’s a real example of what showed up in a college academic integrity case file.
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An assignment was submitted through a learning management system. The system logged the timestamp of every action. The professor pulled the underlying record. It showed when the student opened the assignment, when they paused, when they returned, and at the 3:35 mark, full sections of text being pasted in. The pasted text included formatting markers from the AI tool the student had used.
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The student didn’t know any of that was being recorded. They thought what got submitted was the file. What actually got submitted was the file plus a complete record of how the file was produced.
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If your college student is using AI in their coursework, this is a conversation worth having now. The question isn’t whether they’ll be caught by a detector. It’s whether the platform record will line up with what they say they did.
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Share with another parent of a college student if it’s useful. General educational information, not legal advice

I write the longer version of these — the actual steps, the part that doesn’t fit in a reel — on my Substack. Free, and it goes straight to your inbox. Link in the first comment.

05/08/2026

I’m getting a lot of messages today from parents asking about the Canvas hack. Yes, it’s real — about 9,000 schools and 275 million users may be affected, and a hacker group called ShinyHunters claims to have data including names, student ID numbers, and messages between users.
But here’s the part of this story I think is more useful for parents to talk to their college students about, and it has nothing to do with the hackers themselves.
Canvas stores every message your student has sent their professors. Every assignment submission timestamp. When they opened a quiz, how long they spent on each page, when they clicked away. The sources they accessed in the readings. The hackers reportedly got hold of some of that. The school has all of it, all the time, by design.
In academic integrity cases — which I work on as an education attorney — that’s the exact data the school pulls. The messages your student sent the professor, or didn’t. The submission timestamps. The pause patterns inside the document. None of that requires a breach. It’s how the system was built.
So if you’re going to talk to your college student about Canvas this week, the more useful conversation isn’t about the hackers. It’s about the fact that this data exists at all, and the school can pull it any time. Their Canvas activity is part of their academic record. They should treat it that way.
Share this with another parent of a college student if it’s useful.

I write the longer version of these — the actual steps, the part that doesn’t fit in a reel — on my Substack. Free, and it goes straight to your inbox. Link in the first comment.

05/07/2026

Parents often ask whether a college can really prove that a student used AI.

In many academic integrity cases, the school is not relying on one detector score.

They may look at the assignment instructions, the submitted work, sources, drafts, platform records, prior writing, and what the student says when asked about the assignment.

That is why the student’s explanation matters.

If your student receives an academic integrity notice, read the allegation carefully before responding. Look at the policy. Identify the evidence. Do not assume the issue is only whether an AI detector flagged the work.

General information only. Not legal advice for any specific situation.

05/05/2026

Most academic integrity cases do not start with a student setting out to cheat.

They often start with confusion, pressure, a misunderstood instruction, unauthorized collaboration, or a bad assumption about what is allowed.

That distinction matters.

When a student receives an academic integrity notice, the response should focus on the actual allegation, the course instructions, the policy language, and the evidence. A rushed explanation can make the situation harder to fix.

General information only. Not legal advice for any specific situation.

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