Must 'Claude For Legal' Head Be A Lawyer?

Some have criticised Anthropic’s choice of Robert Mahari as its ‘Head of Claude for Legal’ for not having worked long-term as a lawyer. But, does it matter? In fact, isn’t this an advantage? Artificial Lawyer explores. First, some background. Anthropic has launched its own legal vertical capability: Claude for Legal. It started as a group of ‘skills’ (i.e. a set of complex prompts), but is steadily expanding. Although it’s been helmed by Associate GC, Mark Pike , they’ve now hired a formally designated Head of Claude for Legal. This matters as it suggests the LLM giant is serious about growing in the legal sector. Plus, that role will be vital for Anthropic in terms of liaising with the legal world to help to develop what lawyers want. The hire, which AL shared on Friday, is Robert Mahari , who has primarily worked in academia, with a doctorate in legal AI from MIT and has the position of Fellow of Stanford’s famous Codex legal tech group. Although he has a JD from Harvard, which is no small thing, according to his CV he has only worked in law firms for a short time: for 2 months as a summer intern back in 2020 at Orrick, and before that for another 2 months also as an intern at a Swiss law firm in 2016. As of today, AL’s social media post (via Richard Tromans) about the Anthropic hire has garnered over 470 likes from across the world. However, a couple of lawyers made the following comments: ‘So they hired someone who’s never worked at a law firm?’ And, ‘Weird that they hired a head of Claude for Legal who’s never had an actual job in law.’ Meanwhile, AL has heard similar criticisms – always from lawyers – about the founders of legal tech companies, sometimes because they were only an associate when they left a law firm to create their startup, or perhaps didn’t even get to that point. Either way, the subtext of all such comments, here and elsewhere in the legal tech sector, is that ‘if you’ve not worked for many years inside a law firm or inhouse legal team, then you cannot really understand what lawyers do, and thus your startup (or other offering) doesn’t deserve to succeed and probably won’t’. And of course, they are wrong 99% of the time. The Lawyer Whisperers There are two main arguments as to why the ‘you must be an experienced lawyer to be a legal innovator’ is a bogus thesis. The first is a pragmatic one, namely that to build a piece of software that helps a lawyer to achieve their goals you primarily need to be good at: Listening – so you can really appreciate the challenges lawyers face, which are often not as you might assume when just looking in from the outside. Building with useability in mind – because any software tool you provide must not get in the way. You can call it the Legal Innovator’s Hippocratic Oath , i.e. not to make things harder, or more complex, or slower. Able to turn ideas into working, reliable solutions – because ideas are great, but they need to become real. Cool visualisations and wireframes can win you a hackathon, but will it work inside the intense, high-pressure environment of a Big Law deal team? It has to. Able to iterate – because neither tech, nor lawyers’ needs, stand still. A product that cannot keep iterating and evolving will soon be obsolete. But, do you need to be a partner at a top law firm to do those things? Or to manage the execution of those things? No, not at all. Do you need to understand what a lawyer is telling you about their work, or at least be able to understand the key points that really matter? Yes, absolutely, or at least employ skilled ‘lawyer whisperers’ who can translate accurately. But again, there is no absolute need to be an experienced lawyer yourself if you can do all of the above. — Two Major Legal Innovators Conferences this November Legal Innovators UK – London, Nov 4 and 5 And, then Legal Innovators New York – Nov 17 and 18. — The Game Changers So, the above point covers the practical issues. But there is something deeper going on here. What if the goal of the legal tech company, or LLM giant which is now going into legal, isn’t to simply add some efficiency to the status quo? What if they want to be a game-changer for real, as is their right? Also, what if the legal tech company’s founder, or Claude’s Head of Legal, really understands AI and where it’s heading, and also understands that the legal world doesn’t exist for lawyers, it exists so that society can function well? I.e. civilisation doesn’t care whether lawyers as they are today exist or not, but it does care about a rules-based system that allows people and companies to operate in a secure environment and have recourse to justice. How that goal is achieved is fluid. It may not matter if there are 10 million lawyers in the world, or just 10, what matters is that society meets its legal needs so that it can do the things it really wants to do. The legal sector is primarily a facilitator, it’s not an end in itself. In such a world, would being an experienced lawyer actually be to the detriment of a legal innovator? English and Brazilian-qualified lawyer, Marcelo Moura , who is also UK Ambassador of the Brazilian Legal Tech Association, shared a great metaphor about this with AL recently. ‘You interview a very successful whaler from the 19 th century, who is hunting whales in the Atlantic Ocean for their oil. That oil is used in great cities such as London and New York to power street lights. They could tell you a lot about the seas, about whales, and about hunting, but they may know very little about the energy sector as a whole. However, the primary reason whalers existed was to help power a city’s lights – as this was before electricity.’ I.e. The whaler is focused on their job, but they don’t see the bigger picture. Society needs energy, not whalers and whaling ships. It needs a lot of energy at this time of rapidly growing cities to illuminate the streets. Society doesn’t care if the energy comes from Moby Dick’s cousin, or from copper wire coiled around a spinning magnet, it just wants to meet its needs so that it can function. The same may be true for lawyers. A lawyer today sees their needs, in a firm shaped by the last few decades of time-based business culture, and with clients on the other side who have also been shaped by continually buying certain outputs in certain ways. They see the world as they have experienced it. And that’s to be expected. But things don’t have to remain as they are. Today’s legal sector is just ‘a passing phase’, one could say. A phase that has lasted ‘a long time’, (i.e. several decades), but it is by no means immutable or ‘has to be that way’. Something that has evolved to point X in its history, can also keep evolving to point Y, and onwards – is a reality that AL, as a long-time student of Darwin, likes to underline whenever there is a chance. In which case, someone who has closely studied how lawyers work, and is smart, and can understand legal inputs and outputs, and what is needed by clients to resolve their needs, while also having a very solid appreciation of AI and where it’s heading, may in fact be the best possible person to lead innovation in the legal sector. That doesn’t mean an experienced partner from a top firm could not break away and create their own NewMod, AI-first law firm, and build their own ‘game-changer’ – they can as well. It’s just that they would also need to overcome many years of embedded behaviours. The legal innovator who can see, and listen, and understand, but can also move freely towards a new model for the future driven by AI, without historical baggage, is arguably in a better starting position. So, to conclude, Artificial Lawyer will say again: congrats to Robert, you are exactly the right person for the job! Richard Tromans, Founder, Artificial Lawyer and Chair of the Legal Innovators conferences. — Two Major Legal Innovators Conferences this November Come and join us in New York and London this November at Legal Innovators! Legal Innovators UK – London, Nov 4 and 5 And, then Legal Innovators New York – Nov 17 and 18. After another fantastic Legal Innovators California, where we had speakers from OpenAI, Y Combinator, Google, Meta, and many more pioneering organisations; and our stellar inaugural event in Paris this June, we are now looking forward to the landmark conferences in London and New York, both in November, and both across two days: Law Firm Day, and Inhouse Day. Legal Innovators UK – London, Nov 4 and 5 Legal Innovators New York – Nov 17 and 18 Share this: Tweet Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email Discover more from Artificial Lawyer Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email. Type your email… Subscribe