Breaking the Ice: Lawyer sees AI boosting productivity, pro bono

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Damien Riehl, an attorney and executive with legal technology firm vLex, sees a future where lawyers use artificial intelligence to increase their productivity and, in turn, help serve low-income Americans whose civil legal needs go largely unmet.

“We can’t ‘pro bono’ our way out of this,” said Riehl, who chairs the Minnesota State Bar Association‘s Artificial Intelligence Committee. He cited a Stanford Law School conclusion that “more lawyers is not a viable solution” to access-to-justice issues.

Riehl detailed his AI-powered scenario in an article he wrote for the Bench & Bar of Minnesota, for which he recently received MSBA’s Elmer H. Wiblishauser Author’s Award.

“Never been for in human history has a machine been able to make decisions and have intellect in the way that large language models do,” Riehl said.

Riehl, with an undergraduate degree in education, had planned to be a choir and band conductor until a classroom incident prompted his move to law school.

Name: Damien Riehl

Title: Vice president, solutions champion, vLex

Education: B.S., education, North Dakota State University; J.D., Mitchell Hamline School of Law

Q: Best way to start a conversation with you?

A: If you want to start a conversation with me, raise an interesting question.

Q: Why law school?

A: I was conducting a Brahms piece when two of my tenors started punching each other, and I thought I should probably go to law school. The joke is that I broke up fistfights in the classroom so I could create fistfights in the courtroom.

Q: What are you reading?

A: My friend Sean West wrote a book called “Unruly.” It examines the extent to which, when the rule of law falls, what role is there for lawyers and tools like mine, with legal tech. What good is it if a technology can tell you the answer to a legal question if nobody follows what the law says?

Q: Pet peeve?

A: Banal conversations. We live in such interesting times and I just turned 50, so I feel like I don’t have time to put up with conversations about nothing.

Q: Best part of your work?

A: I spend the morning building legal technology with my team in London, Barcelona and Toronto. In the afternoon I talk with customers, lawyers and in-house counsel about the things I’ve built. When they say, you should build this next thing, then the next morning I work with my team, which is brilliant, to build that thing. I can’t think of a better job.

Q: Most challenging?

A: I was on the road over 200 days in 2024. I stayed in Marriott 110 times and had 97 or 98 flights. It’s quite grueling, my travel schedule. That said, I’m an extrovert, so I enjoy interacting.

Q: Favorite activity away from work?

A: Time with my family. My daughter is 13 and just adorable. My wife is great. And my 20-year-old is finding his way in the world.

Q: Where would you take someone visiting your hometown?

A: I’m from Bismarck and grew up in Mandan [North Dakota]. We spent many days at Fort Lincoln State Park, Custer’s last post before he got killed at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. It’s a lovely place. I’d take them there.

Q: Legal figure you admire?

A: Clarence Darrow. It’s remarkable how such a brilliant person would devote his life to defending the downtrodden in a way that was not monetarily rewarding but was, I’m sure, spiritually rewarding.

Q: Misconception about your work?

A: A lot of people say, I’ve used ChatGPT and it’s not quite there yet. I’d encourage them to pay for the paid versions because there’s a remarkable difference in reasoning between the free version and the paid version. Everything we lawyers do involves words. We ingest words, we analyze words and we output words. Large language models can do all three of those at superhuman speed and at a post-graduate level.

Q: Favorite book, movie or TV show about lawyers?

A: “Attorney for the Damned,” about Clarence Darrow. John Rawls’ “A Theory of Justice,” another book that led me to law school. And “My Cousin Vinny,” because every lawyer loves “My Cousin Vinny.”