VP, Legal in Tech
Practical above all else
Son of an programmer who could never quite get coding and instead made a career of being a lawyer who understands tech. With vibe coding, I've finally crossed the chasm and am thrilled with the possibilities. At work, I've built local and Backstage-hosted applications for use by in-house colleagues and thought deeply about build-versus-buy in the AI era. Outside of work, I've taught law students on advising tech product development teams, contributed to a book on the topic ("Advise, Innovate, and Inspire"), and am engaged with legal tech open source.
As part of a project to build contract analysis tooling for a commercial legal team, I built out a method for non-Legal Quant team members to contribute to the improvement of the system in a fun and engaging way: a gamified interface for QAing the result of both AI and human-generated contract analysis. The output of this tool goes back into a tabular review system and, over time, increases the accuracy of the AI contract extractions. Built a tool for users of an internal tabular review system to either approve or disapprove of a human comparison to AI analysis done by a tabular reviewsystem. Demo video provided.
Built a tool to apply internal team proposals to legal team templates; conduct tabular review of a medium-volume set of contracts; and to do in-depth review of a single contract. Additionally/separately, built a command line interface high-volume contract analyzer to conduct a "portfolio-level" review of contracts for a company, effectively a contracts lifecycle management augmentation.
Lawyers Who Learn
The discussion focuses on John's insights about being an effective legal advisor to non-lawyers in technology companies. He emphasizes the importance of communicating legal advice in practical, accessible ways to engineers and product managers, rather than overwhelming them with complex legal analysis. John explains how moving his desk to sit with the engineering team at a previous company transformed his understanding of their challenges and needs.
UC College of Law, San Francisco
John taught a self-created, open-source curriculum course at UC College of Law, San Francisco, in 2024.
Creative Writing Publications (Various)
Have published short stories and completed novel-length works with various publications.
The marketing around AI and vibe coding is tremendous and exciting -- but I am forever hunting for verifiable examples of rock-solid use cases of widespread adoption. I've seen these internally at work but only in limited cases externally.
This is a funny old quote that I think embodies the Legal Quants philosophy: there are high-value things available in the world, but you need to interact with or make them yourself if you want to their benefit to accrue to you. Don't just wait for someone else to do it for you.