Law + computer science. First principles, frontier problems.
I've been building production AI systems for legal and regulated industries for twenty years. In 2017, while running AI R&D at LegalZoom, I built a real-time legal document recognition system via phone camera — that was before vision-language models existed as a mainstream technology. I started Citational because legal AI is being built on shallow foundations, and I've spent enough time inside both the law and the engineering to know exactly how much that matters — and exactly how profound the transformation could be, given that law is the operating system that everything else runs on.
Background
From 2017 to 2019 I ran AI R&D at LegalZoom, where the first output was Pulse Legaleye — the vision AI system mentioned above. Since then I’ve focused on I’ve spent the years since doing what I was doing before Citational had a name: building serious AI systems for serious organisations, and learning from the constraints that regulated environments impose. I still write code daily.
Since 2021, alongside retained consultancy and systems work, I run an independent research programme in applied legal AI. That programme became Citational. Some recent published work includes research in January 2026 demonstrating the Citational Framework outperforming Westlaw Deep Research on a live query, and the Lawgame white paper in February 2026.
Earlier in my career I built digital infrastructure for two Afghan presidential campaigns, served as strategic advisor to IBM UK’s managing director on repositioning IBM toward developers and startups before Bluemix, and built digital platforms for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the British Council across the MENA region. In 2003 I was a UN Youth Delegate at the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva, contributing to text adopted into the Geneva Declaration of Principles.
- Aramark v CMA - How Lawgame Found a Ground of Appeal That a KC Missed
- The privilege trap in legal AI, and how we avoid it
- Lexos v. Overstock: Five Lawyers, Zero Verification
- Westlaw Deep Research and the cost of category errors
- The Bluebook Is a Turing Test
- The Difference Between a Citation and a Verification
Systems and research built at Citational.
- Lawgame AI simulation of litigation strategy through adversarial play.
- Shinshō-27B Experimental judicial reasoning model trained on 20M+ opinions.
- MotionValidator Citation-level verification for court filings.
- PriorStatement Assertion-comparison engine for litigation document review.