Earlier this month, the Vanderbilt AI Law Lab (VAILL) hosted a workshop and conversation on legal careers in AI and legal technology at Vanderbilt Law. Moderated by Associate Director Emily Pavuluri, the conversation featured Gordon Moffat, Manager of eDiscovery and Litigation Technology at the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office, and Cal Yeaman, Senior Strategic AI Advisor at Everlaw.
Moffat is an experienced leader in legal technology, previously serving as litigation support lead and director at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman and Baker Donelson. Prior to Everlaw, Yeaman led an interdisciplinary litigation support team as a Project Attorney with Orrick Analytics at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, working at the intersection of law, technology, and data. Both panelists have years of hands-on experience in legal technology and e-discovery, helping firms and clients implement innovative technology and understand how it can inform the projects and processes behind complex litigation.
Current Legal Tech Landscape
Moffat explored the three essential areas of litigation technology: e-discovery, case management, and trial presentation technology. He joked that the space originally grew out of just “begging people not to try to do everything in Adobe” and has now become a wide space for technical tools and practices.
Yeaman compared his prior experience on the firm side of litigation technology, where his work was a constant balance between various clients’ needs, to his current vendor-facing role.
“I am [now] working much closer to the genesis of the tech, as a subject matter expert with a cross-functional group of people who may have never created a deposition or chronology outline or cross examination but are building the tools that enable that,” Yeaman said. “They understand the ‘what’ and ‘how’, but not as much ‘why’. Being a person who helps [the vendor] understand their customers and how they’re actually using the tools is a different role.”
Using Yeaman’s story, Pavuluri underscored the flexibility behind a law degree – that there’s always room for lawyers who understand the ‘why’ and can make technology better for other attorneys using it. Moffat noted the career-enhancing benefits of leveraging these tools early in a career.
“One of the great things you can do if you come out of the job market is immediately find out what’s available, rather than running into a problem and trying to dig a canal around it,” Moffat explained. “You can set yourself apart by doing that.”
Moffat and Yeaman also offered some perspective into the day-to-day aspects of their roles. Moffat’s work typically fluctuates between professional development work, like preparing for International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) events, to the fielding of questions about data and preparing workflows for upcoming matters. Yeaman advises Everlaw clients, across corporations, pro-bono work, and firms, on best practices for machine learning and generative AI tools. Both highlighted the people-centered aspects of their work.
AI in Legal Technology
While litigation tools like machine learning, Boolean searching, and e-discovery have been around for decades, with the advent of AI, Moffat and Yeaman are seeing more rapid adoption and iteration cycles, especially in document review.
“What generative AI has done is taken that first level of review, where you used to have fifty reviewers working forty hours a week, you can have four or five people running prompts to essentially code documents and validate their results,” Moffat explained. “You have a more immediate, potentially relevant set, (which) takes a whole bunch of revenue out but saves clients tons of money.”
With the evolving nature of AI, elements of tools are still in “flux,” including complex fee structures and credit systems; precision, recall, and accuracy; and information retrieval.
Shifts in the Legal Profession
Pavuluri noted that many popular questions about AI’s impact on the legal profession center on the impact of new tools on jobs and career opportunities.
“I am a bit more optimistic about this space, because I think there’s always got to be, as the joke says, a human in the loop. There has to be someone reviewing, and also a question of risk allocation, and who we blame when something goes wrong,” Pavuluri said.
Moffat explained that his “slice” of the public sector remains relatively similar, because of attorney shortages and turnover, even with constantly evergreen technology initiatives. He noted the potential challenge that would come with partners launching “AI-Native” boutique practices without associates and paralegals, leaving new attorneys with fewer experienced attorneys to learn from.
“Differentiate yourself as early and as deeply as you can, and you will have productive work for the rest of your life,” Moffat advised.
“[Firms] are hiring new skill sets they don’t already have to bolster or supplement to the intake of quality people who can do quality work,” Yeaman said. “If you understand AI, even just ChatGPT and Claude, and you can understand why something’s a garbage answer versus a good answer, what the benefit of context is, you can give them high value with a legal mind on day one.”
Advice for Career Longevity
Moffat emphasized the power of a growth mindset and comfort with continuous learning. “Rather than thinking, ‘oh, I’m going to have this time of development, then reach a plateau, and my life will be on cruise control,’ understand that you’re going to have struggle and learn.”
“Having a sense of play is incredibly important in an age of technology, bound mostly by what the latest frontier model does and how creative you are,” said Yeaman. “I have been told things cannot be done and I have built them easily because I’ve considered them from the perspective of ‘why not?’”
“Figure out what is sustainable for you, what nourishes you, and don’t lose the things that make you different from other people, because those are things that will always make you stand out.”