Damien Riehl.

Building legal AI

Technologist

A coder since 1985 who has spent the past decade building AI-backed legal software — and the legal data standards that make it trustworthy — in service of access to justice.

Damien Riehl presenting beside a projected knowledge-graph visualization.

At Clio — which combines the Business of Law and the Practice of Law, including Vincent, Clio Work, Fastcase, and Docket Alarm — Damien helps expand products that integrate AI-backed technologies into a billion-document dataset from 100+ countries, all to improve legal workflows.

With FOLIO, the legal ontology project from the ALEA Institute, Damien helps corporations, their law firms, and legal-technology vendors implement legal data standards. For years he led SALI, the legal data standard, where he developed and greatly expanded a taxonomy of over 18,000 legal tags — building knowledge graphs for legal determinism, and fueling the legal industry’s work in generative AI, analytics, and interoperability.

Tag everything that matters, and let language models reason over ground truth. Symbolic AI (knowledge graphs) plus neural nets (LLMs) beats either alone.

Access to justice

Damien is Chair of the Minnesota State Bar Association’s AI Committee, which oversees an AI Sandbox to promote access to justice (A2J). He is also working with courts nationwide (e.g., Colorado, Arizona, Louisiana) on how AI can improve access-to-justice initiatives — helping legal-aid organizations and self-represented people get real help.

Access to justice

The MSBA AI Sandbox, and partnerships with the Colorado and Arizona courts, ask a practical question: how can AI safely put legal help within reach of people who could never afford a lawyer?

Public access to the courts

In 2025, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts appointed Damien to the Electronic Public Access (EPA) Public User Group — an eleven-person panel advising the federal judiciary on improving PACER, the system that holds the nation’s federal court records.

Damien’s advocacy there is direct: PACER should be free. The law that binds us all should be open to all — not gated behind per-page fees that put public court records out of reach for everyone but the well-resourced. Making PACER free is access to justice at the level of the record itself.

The law binds every socioeconomic stratum — so every stratum should be able to read it. Public court records should be public, and free.

Autonomous vehicles

Damien is Co-Chair of the Minnesota Governor’s Council on Connected and Automated Vehicles, helping recommend changes to Minnesota statutes, rules, and policies for connected and autonomous vehicles.

His public stance on AI and the law is gathered under Speaking; the courtroom foundation under it is on Lawyer.