Need the head of Anthropic’s “Claude for Legal” have experience practicing law?
A number of lawyers commenting on LinkedIn have called out Anthropic for last week’s appointment of Robert Mahari, who has mostly worked in academia, for not having the legal experience lawyers in a law firm would bring to Anthropic.
As Richard Tromans of Artificial Lawyer reports, Mahari has a doctorate in legal AI from MIT, the position of Fellow of Stanford’s famous Codex legal tech group, a JD from Harvard and worked in two law firms, only briefly and in a limited capacity as an intern at Orrick and a Swiss law firm.
Perhaps more importantly, Tromans makes the case that lawyers and the public would be better served by someone other than a practicing lawyer leading the development on AI in the law.
“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?”
I don’t think we’re headed for ten lawyers, but I do see many advantages in the development of AI legal solutions focused on helping people and businesses being lead by someone other than a lawyer. Not the least of which is having strong tech and innovation skills and a passion for providing access to the law.