I bet a handful of names consistently come to mind first when you think of the most impactful, innovative, or memorable subject matter experts in your industry.
For me, one of those names is Bennett Borden.
When I was still new to legal tech, I had a chance to listen in on a few brainstorming sessions and interviews between Bennett, Andrew Sieja, Nick Robertson, and other Relativity and industry leaders. Being a fly on the wall of those conversations taught me a lot.
To begin with: a successful Am Law 100 partner stepping away from that coveted role to pursue a career in data science should give everyone a deeper appreciation for the impact that technology has on the modern practice of law.
When you get down to it, everything we do in the Legal Data Intelligence space goes back to the fundamental belief that the intentional, creative application of cutting-edge technology can have a hugely positive impact on the pursuit of justice.
Recently, Bennett announced his latest adventure in that pursuit: founding Clarion AI Partners, a boutique law firm specializing in advising clients on the use of artificial intelligence. These clients are looking to solve complex business challenges and, more importantly, help close the gap in access to justice, with fit-for-purpose and ethically implemented AI. Clarion is there to help.
The news reminded me of the ripple effect Bennett’s role as Drinker Biddle & Reath’s first-ever chief data scientist had on the legal tech space back in 2015. At that time, Relativity’s Nick Roberston interviewed Bennet to celebrate the occasion.
Today, we’re following up on that conversation with a new interview. In this first part, learn more about Bennett’s career path and his advice for those who’d like to follow it.
In part two, we’ll share his insights on this moment in legal applications of AI—from agentic AI to prompting best practices and plenty more.
Sam Bock: After you became Drinker Biddle & Reath’s first-ever chief data scientist in 2015, during an interview with Relativity’s Nick Robertson, you spoke a lot about the evolving practice of law. Now, another 10 years down the road, we’d like to ask again: what can you tell us about the changing role of the attorney?
Bennett Borden: The role of an attorney is fundamentally the same and remains critically important. We are meant to provide counsel, zealous representation—and we are agents of justice and of mercy. The thing that has really changed is the technology supporting our abilities to do that, enabling us to deliver faster, more accurate, consistent, and timely advice—at a cheaper rate, frankly. How we go about being zealous advocates has changed significantly and is about to change massively with AI and agentic AI. But our roles are really the same. They are even more important than ever.
We are in a time of unprecedented change with the advent of AI, especially generative and moving into agentic AI. Every aspect of our society is going to change. I’ve been quoted many times in my belief that AI is the most disruptive and transformative technology since electricity. The effect it’s going to have on us as citizens, employees, and members of society generally—it’s going to change everything we do and almost every way we interact. And as with every truly powerful technology, it has almost unimaginable benefits attached to it. But it can also be used for really evil purposes. So, our job as lawyers, to be able to advise our clients and stay up-to-date on how these changes are occurring and how we can give advice, becomes more important than ever.
Sam, lawyers are information dealers. It’s what we do. No matter what your area is, we take information needed to understand a situation—when a client comes to us with a problem and we need to find out what the heck is going on. We then apply our legal acumen to it, so that we can evaluate it, change it, or whatever we need to do. And then we deliver information-based products. Whether it’s an argument, a motion, or an agreement, we are the ultimate dealers in information and the ultimate wordsmiths.
Tell us about Clarion AI Partners. What is Clarion’s mission, and why did you decide to start your own firm?
I am deeply proud of Clarion AI Partners. The idea has been coming for a while. Working in big law for all of my career, I’ve been blessed to work with some of the world's greatest minds in many different industries, including some of the best lawyers in the world. It has been a tremendous career path for me. But especially in the years since generative AI came out, working with these big tech companies and industry companies has given me the chance to be involved in meetings at the White House, congressional hearings, private briefings for the US Congress, EU Parliament, and all around the world with new AI ministries. We’re at this pivotal moment where figuring out the regulation of AI—how do we create safe, effective AI?—is one of the most important things that needs to happen right now. There are not many people with a blend of skills that are both deeply technical and deeply legal and regulatory. Most of us work for Big Law or Big Tech. And in Big Law, there are limitations on what we can talk about publicly and advocate for.
I felt I needed to bring a little more balance to the force. Our tagline at Clarion is “AI for good, AI for all.” At least some of the world's leading legal and technical advice shouldn’t cost $1500 per hour. It needs to be more democratized. We need to be able to interact with policymakers, legislators, et cetera, and talk openly about the challenges and what can and can’t be done. I felt like I couldn’t do that from my position in Big Law.
At Clarion we’ve built a really unique thing. Those of us who are lawyers are all data scientists, too. We give legal advice about really tricky AI questions, especially around governance: helping companies set up AI strategy and governance programs. But the cooler thing is that we also help build solutions for clients. We have The Foundry, which is a team of data scientist builders. We’re neck-deep building all kinds of tools, including chatbots and other AI for internal or external use.
For example, we’re working with a healthcare system out west to build a digital parent resource center for parents with autistic children. We’re trying to take all the information that is available to them from the client’s various websites and other materials, and put it in a single database. Then, we’ll use retrieval augmented generation systems—AI—to make it hugely more accessible. Imagine if, instead of searching and browsing and clicking around for an afternoon, you’ve got a compassionate, friendly, approachable source to help you find this info.
Building stuff is crazy fun, especially at the cutting edge of constitutional AI. And we’re very busy doing that. But we can also oversee building if a client has good building capabilities of their own (and ensure our advice is protected by privilege), or simply help build in tech controls that spit out metrics to help prove the AI system is staying within parameters (whether those are internal policies or broader ethical, regulatory, or legal considerations). A lot of companies fall down on this; they build something great, but if a problem arises, they don’t have the proof or metrics to back up the validity of that work. And going back to get it is way harder than building it in from the start.
The other offering from our Foundry is independent testing, which we can use to independently conduct third-party audits of AI-based systems and validate other tech.
But what I’m most proud of is Clarion AI Academy. This is all of our philanthropic work, helping nonprofits evaluate how AI can be used to meet a particular need—everything from poverty to access to justice—and building AI capacity and literacy in underserved communities.
One of my favorites to work with is the National Center on Sexual Exploitation; we help with their legislative strategy and have built some cool tools with them. We also work with bar associations to educate lawyers on AI and how to use it, and with the bench, we talk about bringing AI into court systems to help the administration of justice (they do a lot of things over and over, which is the type of work that’s perfectly suited for AI optimization).
We also work with school districts all across the United States to help them evaluate and roll out educational AI tools, which is going to reshape the world of education. We’re helping higher education institutions in the same way, and supporting the development of new curriculum for K-12 and college students around online safety and AI literacy.
So, the Academy side is near and dear to my heart. I’m 56 years old, looking at the last 10 years of my career, and really felt like the best use of my heart and experience right now is to democratize access to really good AI legal and technical advice. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.
Can you share some of what you’ve learned over the course of your career?
I have had such an utterly fortunate and blessed career. I started out as a poor kid from the middle of nowhere in Tennessee. I came from a pretty difficult upbringing and was on my own by the time I was in my teens. I’ve always brought this sense of profound sensitivity to justice and fairness to my work. Being a have-not while growing up has given me a particular sense of why being a lawyer matters so much. It’s why I care so much about equity and access to justice.
Looking back, the best thing that happened in my career early on was starting to work at Gibson Dunn. Being trained by some of the most talented leaders on earth—Joe Warin, Drew Tulumello, Mike Flannigan—they taught me how to be a really exceptional lawyer.
It’s funny; I started there in the fall of 2004, right before the 2005 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which ultimately launched the e-discovery era. I remember a meeting where they called all the new associates together. The firm had landed this gigantic case, with dozens of parties and third parties, litigation, regulatory actions—it was giant. And one of the mid-level associates who became a dear friend was like, “Okay, who wants to be in charge of discovery?” People just looked around, and I raised my hand. Coming from the CIA and knowing a little about data classification and stuff like that, I thought I could help. And it turned out that basically defined the rest of my life.
Back then e-discovery meant a basement full of 150 contract attorneys using Boolean searches at banks of computers, and I thought immediately, “I know there’s a better way to do this.” This was when Relativity was first coming online, and I quickly began to see that this is all just a data insight process. It really defined my career: bringing machine learning-driven data classification into the discovery process. Everything we learned in e-discovery we can apply to regulatory, knowledge management. It’s the same issue.
I was also lucky to get involved in the Sedona Conference very early on. Richard Braman, John Facciola, Shira Scheindlin, Andrew Peck, Craig Shaffer—these were judges who were trying to figure out this entire new area of law. Visionaries like Jason Baron, Maura Grossman, Wendy Butler Curtis, Molly Nichols, Aaron Crews—they all became dear friends over 20 years of wrestling with this problem of how to get insight out of data.
Everywhere I worked, I had people who believed in what I was trying to accomplish. I quickly learned that e-discovery is a pain in the ass because nobody governs their data upstream, so I tried to push our clients toward better information governance. If you just create your data purposefully and put it in places that make sense with the right classifications, you can do anything with it—including discovery.
I also have to give a big shoutout to Andy Kassner, then chairman of Drinker Biddle, because, when we took the team we had then to Drinker, Andy just believed in us 100 percent. He gave us the ability to build a subsidiary that was totally data driven. Ten years of my life at Drinker under his leadership really allowed me to move into algorithmic fairness, design, and so on. It’s been a really cool, cutting-edge career. But I kinda lucked into it along the way, and it’s been wonderful to feel like I’m in the company of visionaries who’ve pushed the field of data and the law forward.
For those interested in following a career path like yours, what are some can’t-miss educational opportunities and resources they should know about?
Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil is my favorite book. I became friends with her; she's a dear friend and the most brilliant data scientist I’ve ever known.
The Atomic Human by Neil Lawrence and Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark are also excellent reads.
For current content, Forbes’s AI coverage is amazing. The insights I get out of their tech coverage are invaluable. Also, MIT Technology Review is a great resource.
The best research is coming out of Google DeepMind Research Lab, OpenAI, and Anthropic Research Lab. It's very technical but some of the best research available.
I would also just encourage people to go to YouTube. Search for RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) and constitutional AI. Look up adversarial bots or warrior bots, in which you set QC bots against each other to optimize AI outputs. There is a lot of great stuff by the big names to help you geek out on all of this.
Some of this is really technical. Just remember that, as a lawyer, you don’t have to understand all the details of why or how it works. Just how to make it safe.
Graphics for this article were created by Sarah Vachlon.
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