Résumé

Summary

Lawyer and technologist with 25+ years at the intersection of courts, code (legal code, computer code), and the rule of law. Clerk to two chief judges (Minnesota Court of Appeals; U.S. District Court, D. Minn.); complex-litigation attorney; digital-forensics lead; and architect of the open legal-data standards (SALI/FOLIO — an OWL knowledge graph) that make legal AI verifiable. Now at Clio, helping build Vincent across a 110+-country legal dataset. Advisor to Administrative Office of U.S. Courts and supreme courts nationwide; AI work cited by a U.S. federal court; two issued patents; three litigation-practice books; advising and leading state bars’ access-to-justice AI work.

Core Competencies

Legal-by-design product building · Legal AI evaluation & verifiability · Legal-data standards & ontologies (SALI, FOLIO) · AI/ML/NLP for law · Rule-of-law & AI governance · Access to justice · Litigation & complex disputes · Digital forensics & cybersecurity · Public policy & governmental appointments

Selected Achievements

• Lawyer and builder of “legal by design” legal technology — designing products where lawful, verifiable behavior is built into the system, not bolted on: open legal-data ontologies (SALI/FOLIO), litigation “pleading tag” data structures, and retrieval-grounded legal AI that anchors model output to primary law.
• Architect of worldwide legal-data standards — led SALI for five years, growing the open SALI/FOLIO ontology (OWL/RDFS) from ~1,000 to 18,000+ machine-readable tags adopted by the world’s largest law firms, legal-tech companies, and corporations; built free, open-source tools on Claude (FOLIO Enrich, Mapper, OntoKit) toward a deterministic, computable “legal oracle” that AI agents can query to check lawful behavior across jurisdictions.
• Two issued U.S. patents (named inventor) — US 11,868,936 B2, legal workflow & practice management (with Thomson Reuters: structuring every legal task across the matter lifecycle); and US 12,153,886 B2, structuring litigation dockets via “pleading tags” to power data-driven analytics (with Fastcase) — the workflow and data systems legal AI is built on.
• All the Music — co-founded the project that algorithmically generated every melody that can exist (471 billion) and dedicated them all to the public domain (CC0) — to help songwriters create freely, mitigating the risk of copyright threats.
• Two decades of writing on law and technology — three West Academic books on litigation practice and 16 law-review and legal-journal articles on legal AI, copyright, digital forensics, and the law of emerging technology (full list below).
• Recognition — selected for the Financial Times FT Law 50 (June 2026 London announcement forthcoming); named by the FT among the “six champions of generative AI innovation” (2023).
• Organized a January 2026 open letter supporting the rule of law, signed by more than 650 legal professionals.
• Cited by a U.S. federal court — in a case striking AI-fabricated citations — as a model for how AI can improve legal practice: “AI, in many ways, has the potential to revolutionize legal practice for the better. See Damien Riehl …” Kohls v. Ellison, Case No. 24-cv-3754 (LMP/DLM) (D. Minn. Jan. 10, 2025).

Technology

2015–present · ten years building AI for the law

Clio — Nov. 2025 – present
Solutions Champion

• Help build Vincent, Clio’s legal-AI system that runs 50-state and multi-country legal surveys across a dataset spanning 110+ countries — parsing cases, statutes, regulations, motions, briefs, pleadings, and orders into structured, verifiable answers.
• Integrate large language models (Claude, GPT, Gemini, and others) into legal workflows, grounding outputs in primary law (from corpus of 110+ countries) to reduce hallucination and make AI legal reasoning auditable.
• Speak and write across the country and around the world, gathering practitioner insight and translating it into product design — same team since 2019: Fastcase → vLex → Clio.

vLex (acquired by Clio) — Apr. 2023 – Nov. 2025
VP, Solutions Champion

• Led design, development, and expansion of products integrating generative AI (including Claude) into legal workflows and data analytics — tools that help lawyers work faster and more accurately.
• Helped build Vincent, among the first retrieval-grounded generative-AI legal assistants, anchoring model output to authoritative law across jurisdictions.

Fastcase (acquired by vLex) — July 2019 – May 2023
VP, Litigation Workflow & Analytics Content; Managing Director (Product Workflow; Legal Research Platform)

• Led litigation-analytics content and product workflow, powering legal data analytics from raw court dockets.
• Built AI-backed legal-research and docket-analytics products; co-invented the “pleading tags” data structure (US Patent 12,153,886 B2) that turns unstructured litigation filings into machine-readable, queryable data.

Thomson Reuters — Mar. 2015 – May 2016
Senior Product Strategist (Director level)

• Designed software and led a team designing the legal-content data structure mapping every legal task across the matter lifecycle — foundation of US 11,868,936 B2.
• Interviewed hundreds of lawyers and in-house counsel (US and UK) to ground product design in real practice; led an agile process with architects and engineers to build complex workflow software.
• Applied early machine-learning and NLP to structure legal content for the legal industry and the judiciary — at the world’s largest legal-information company.

Practice

~1997–2019 · courts, law firms, and digital forensics

Stroz Friedberg (an Aon company) — June 2017 – June 2019
Vice President & Engagement Manager

• Led cybersecurity incident-response investigations — data breaches, insider threats, malware, and social engineering — including the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica engagement.
• Directed digital-forensics engagements reconstructing user and attacker activity across endpoints, servers, and cloud environments; coordinated proactive resilience (penetration testing, threat simulation, pre-attack counseling).
• Developed AI solutions for e-discovery and big-data engagements using NLP and data-analytics clustering.

Robins Kaplan LLP — Sept. 2005 – Mar. 2015
Attorney

• Litigated and counseled across various practice areas — intellectual property, contracts, antitrust, trademarks, finance, and technology — for clients ranging from individuals to Fortune 25 companies.
• Built the firm’s data-privacy, security, HIPAA, social-media, and legal-ethics policies.
• Spearheaded technology and process-driven innovations to improve case workflow and efficiency.

U.S. District Court, D. Minnesota — Aug. 2004 – Aug. 2005
Judicial Clerk to Hon. Michael J. Davis, Chief Judge

• Drafted orders and memoranda for the Chief Judge across civil and criminal matters — many involving e-discovery and emerging technology.
• Analyzed hundreds of pending cases, advising the Court on intellectual-property and complex civil litigation.

Jardine, Logan & O’Brien, P.L.L.P. — Sept. 2003 – Aug. 2004
Attorney

• Represented municipalities and insurers in state and federal courts.
• Defended insurers in automobile-accident matters turning on human negligence — liability questions that now help anchor my autonomous-vehicles policy work.

Minnesota Court of Appeals — Aug. 2002 – Aug. 2003
Judicial Clerk to Chief Judge Edward Toussaint

• Drafted appellate opinions and bench memoranda for judicial panels; reviewed and edited other judges’ draft opinions for accuracy.
• Led the organization and editing of the Court of Appeals Style Manual and Standards of Review.

U.S. Bankruptcy Court, D. North Dakota — 1997 – 1999
Case Administrator

• Built the court’s first website and populated its historical filing database; managed one-third of North Dakota’s bankruptcy filings — shipping court technology before law school.

Policy

throughout · access to justice & public service — boards, councils & coalitions

• Chair, AI Committee, Minnesota State Bar Association — oversees the AI Sandbox expanding legal services to underserved communities.
• Co-Chair, Minnesota Governor’s Council on Connected & Automated Vehicles (appointed by Gov. Walz), 2019–present.
• Board Member (volunteer), ALEA Institute (open-source KL3M models + FOLIO), 2024–present.
• Board Member (volunteer), Scale Justice (formerly Pro Bono Net) — a nonprofit building digital tools and partnerships to expand access to justice for low-income people — 2025–present.
• Advisor on AI for the courts — helping them use AI to better deliver justice:
  • Colorado Supreme Court (Legal Technology Advisory Committee)
  • Arizona Supreme Court & Maricopa County (the nation’s third-busiest trial court)
  • Louisiana’s appellate courts
• Federal courts’ Electronic Public Access Public User Group (2025–present).
• Leadership Team, SALI Alliance (2020–2025).

Speaking

• Since ChatGPT’s debut, 200+ talks (most as solo keynotes) translating AI-and-law for the people who run the legal system — including the State Bar of Texas Annual Conference plenary (3,000+ attendees), the American Bar Association (TECHSHOW ethics; National Conference of Bar Presidents), the U.S. federal judiciary, the statewide judicial conferences of Arizona, Minnesota & Nevada, a dozen other state bars, and partner retreats at AmLaw 100 firms. TEDx speaker; full record.

Education

• J.D., William Mitchell College of Law (1999–2002) — Executive Editor, William Mitchell Law Review.
• B.S., Music Education, North Dakota State University (1993–1997).