Weil Chief AI & Innovation Officer Andrew Simon recently brought his perspective on the future of legal innovation to the LegalQuants podcast. He joined host Victor Wang to discuss building an “innovation startup” within the Firm, responsibly scaling AI, developing custom legal tech and navigating the intersection of law and technology.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Andrew touched on a variety of philosophical, technical and practical implementation topics, some of which include:

• His unique career path – moving from Big Law to a tech startup, applying supply-chain math and machine learning at BCG and ultimately moving to Weil to spearhead innovation.
• How he runs something like a startup within a global Big Law firm, where lawyers bring ideas and prototypes, a small team turns them into working applications and new models are tested before changing anything that already works.
• The practical realities of deploying AI in a premier law firm, including how he evaluates new legal AI tools by looking at how they were developed and whether their business case extends beyond a single use case.
• Why data retrieval remains one of the most formidable hurdles in legal AI and why Weil utilizes a hybrid approach.
• How Weil decentralizes innovation while addressing the three primary hurdles to adoption: understanding a new idea, believing it can be built and changing how you work.
• The origin story of BenchMark – a Weil AI tool that analyzes a judge’s public record to enhance litigator preparation, which grew out of a client’s question.
• Why Weil’s Lawyer-Augmented Solutions Engineering & Research (LASER) team stays lean, what he looks for in technical hires and his three-year vision for success.

The full LegalQuants video interview can be viewed on YouTube here.