AI Series - Part IV: The Process of Innovation in the Legal Tech Space

Each of our three panelists have co-founded a legal tech company. They come from very different backgrounds and have employed very different approaches in solving problems. One is an Amlaw 50, Harvard law grad type. Another has a Carnegie Mellon masters in computer science with an emphasis on NLP and ML. A third is a learn it on the fly, experienced, ACEDS certified eDiscovery specialist. They will discuss the problems they identified, how they tried to solve them, the technologies they used, how they built their solution and how one can reasonably divine quality in their spaces.

Moderator:

Harry Buck, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Legal Outsourcing 2.0

Harry Buck is the Founder and CEO of Legal Outsourcing 2.0 www.legaloutsourcing2.com . Legal Outsourcing 2.0 helps legal technology companies create their solutions and uses legal technology solutions to deliver value to corporate and law firm clients. Harry practiced law for 15 years, mostly as a litigator. During that time, he was twice elected as a State Bar Commissioner and elected as a member of the American Board of Trial Advocates. For the past 20 years he has been involved in legal technology and legal outsourcing. He received his BA from Brown University and his JD from Pace University Law School. He is a Board Member of the NY Metro Chapter of ACEDS.

Speakers:

John Snyder, Chairman, Agnes Intelligence

John Snyder is a Co-Founder of Agnes Intelligence www.agnesintel.com and currently serves as its Chairman. He graduated from Brown as an undergraduate and Harvard Law School. He clerked for a Federal District Court Judge and spent six years as an associate at Proskauer Rose. He has practiced in Manhattan since 2010 representing technology focused clients. In 2016, he was rated a top 40 under 40 litigator in New York, and since 2017 he has been honored as a “Top 100” Litigation Lawyer in the State of New York.

He founded Agnes Intelligence in 2018 which has created an AI-enabled business and forensics platform for hosting and analyzing big data. It is particularly effective for non-traditional, i.e. audio and visual, media.

Lars Mahler, Chief Science Officer, LegalSifter

Lars Mahler is a Co-Founder of LegalSifter www.legalsifter.com and serves as its Chief Science Officer. Lars received his undergraduate degree from Ohio Wesleyan and a master’s in computer science with a specialization in machine learning and natural language processing from Carnegie Mellon. Lars worked as a manager at Accenture before his graduate work and helped found LegalSifter while he was still in grad school in 2014.

Lars has overseen the development of over 700 algorithms designed to identify legal concepts in unstructured data, such as contracts. LegalSifter offers two products. Its first product (called LegalSifter) uses AI to help clients review and negotiate contracts. Its second product (called Sifter Concierge) is a contract librarian service that organizes and catalogs signed contracts.

Oran Sears, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Canopy

Oran Sears is a Co-Founder of Canopy www.canopyco.io and serves as its Chief Product and Technology Officer. Oran is ACEDS certified and is also certified in cyber investigations and counterintelligence threat analysis. He has spent about 15 years in the software industry much of which involved software solutions in the eDiscovery space. Prior to cofounding Canopy, Oran had a similar role with ZyLAB where he was Director of Sales Engineering and US Product Management.

Oran has overseen the development of not only a tool, but in some ways a new field, protected data discovery. Canopy is specifically designed for data breach discovery including cyber security investigations, analysis and notification reviews. It creates efficiencies by using NLP and ML technology.