AI Visionaires
Celebrating the leaders of legal AI
This annual list recognizes a unique group of innovators, pioneers, and legal professionals tending to the future of AI in legal. These are the AI Visionaries.
Artificial intelligence has been nothing if not wild growth. Here at Relativity we thought, let’s lean into that. Tending to that wilderness, taming it, merging, even. It's a tendency common to our AI Visionaries in 2025. A growth mindset—growing their teams, their organizations, themselves. Guiding us through change, learning as they go. Blossoming. We thank you, AI Visionaries of 2025, for your vision and your leadership.
2025 AI Visionaries
Within e-discovery especially, the volume and proliferation of data, expectations of clients, and the volume of litigation, investigations, and regulatory interaction all mean that stagnant technology quickly becomes unfit for purpose. AI is one tool capable of allowing us to maintain or even improve standards against an increasingly complex and demanding backdrop.
Roman Barbera
Executive Director
Roman Barbera
So much time is spent managing low-value, irrelevant data. AI can help rebalance the efforts so we can spend more time on the most important elements of our roles. Everyone I know has too much to do; I am optimistic AI will help us scale to our full potential.
E.J. Bastien
Senior Director of Discovery Programs
E.J. Bastien
Community is vital in this space, as collaboration fosters shared knowledge, builds trust, and ensures that AI is developed and applied ethically and effectively across the profession.
Fiona Campbell
Head of Electronic Disclosure
Fiona Campbell
This moment is exciting because we get to work at an historic inflection point, where new technology solutions can be injected into issues that have been plaguing lawyers for decades.
Jon Chan
Senior Managing Director
Jon Chan
What we lawyers do, if we're good at this job, is ask really good questions. We take information in, apply the rules, and based on that, we advise. Using AI to be quicker and deeper in how you can do that means you're going to be more effective as an advocate and advisor for your client.
Aaron Crews
Partner – Innovation Practice Group
Aaron Crews
While technology changes quickly, the core principles of good lawyering and data management remain the same. AI introduces its own twists on that, but we can build on existing data compliance considerations and processes that are already central to traditional information governance and privacy programs.
Tara Emory
Special Counsel
Tara Emory
In this AI landscape, agility and adaptability are the order of the day and it is the decisions and investments we make now that will set us up for success over the longer term.
Hilary Goodier
Partner and Global Head of Ashurst Advance
Hilary Goodier
Generative AI is an incredibly powerful tool, and if leveraged correctly, it has the potential to reshape the legal industry for the better. The key is to embrace innovation while maintaining the rigorous standards that legal work demands.
Kacey Hall
Counsel, Head of E-Discovery
Kacey Hall
I see AI as a valuable tool that can assist with tasks such as research and data analysis. However, human reasoning and judgment are essential for legal strategy, nuanced tasks, and contextual understanding. Additionally, ethical oversight, auditing, and validation will always require human input.
Erica Hawthorne
eDiscovery Manager
Erica Hawthorne
The prize we have been chasing in e-discovery for the last two decades is how to do review cheaper and faster, but also with better quality results. Generative AI is a tool that potentially can move us closer to that previously unachievable goal.
Matthew Jackson
Counsel Data Analytics and eDiscovery
Matthew Jackson
The idea that lawyers will be easily replaced by AI simply because AI systems are effective at knowledge retrieval fundamentally misunderstands the service that lawyers provide. Knowing the answer to a client's question is often the easiest part of the job. Knowing what to do with that answer? That is the real work.
Matt Kelly
Counsel
Matt Kelly
Generative AI represents a groundbreaking shift in technology, fundamentally transforming the way we interact with information. In a remarkably short time, it has redefined modern workflows--making it as integral to our daily operations as a search engine.
Sean Liddle
Head of Discovery - Switzerland
Sean Liddle
I'm most excited to see how AI helps lawyers elevate the practice of law. Generative AI offers an opportunity to reduce the "busy work" that plagues so many tasks in discovery. I want to see this technology enable lawyers to focus on their highest-value work: shaping case strategy and presenting evidence effectively for their clients.
Martha Louks
Director of Technology Services
Martha Louks
We are in exciting times as innovative generative AI tools continue to push the boundaries of legal technology with automation and productivity gains that contribute to greater efficiency and cost reduction.
Cecil Lynn
Senior Director, Associate General Counsel, Global Head of eDiscovery
Cecil Lynn
With AI, dramatic results no longer require heroic efforts. As the legal landscape becomes increasingly data-driven, professionals who embrace AI gain a significant competitive advantage, enabling them to provide more efficient, accurate, and effective legal services.
Andrew Myers
Discovery Counsel
Andrew Myers
AI now allows us, at significantly reduced cost and time, to speed up our work, introduce other viewpoints by drawing out connections we might not have made, and grow our services to clients. It's also very exciting, as a technologist, to be working with something having a profound effect in our lives, inside and outside of work.
Armando Nardo
Senior Managing Director, Global Forensic Technology Leader
Armando Nardo
My advice: Don't adopt AI, adopt outcomes. Don't think of AI as AI. Don't think of it as a plug-in to solve your problems. Your goal is to solve your problems using anything that gets you there in an effective manner. The key is being able and willing to measure what is effective.
Jeremy Pickens
Head of Applied Science
Jeremy Pickens
While AI is transformative, it simply can't replicate the nuanced judgment, ethical considerations, and strategic thinking that are the hallmarks of effective legal practice. AI frees up our time from routine tasks, allowing us to focus on complex legal challenges and provide personalized guidance to our clients.
Ashley Picker Dubin
Counsel
Ashley Picker Dubin
We're still early in the "AI-enabled future," and today's products have strengths and weaknesses. A good provider will be transparent about where their products succeed and where they might not. Be cautious if you attend a demo and don't feel heard, or if your questions weren't answered directly and satisfactorily. Trust your instincts.
Benjamin Sexton
Senior Vice President of Innovation and Strategy
Benjamin Sexton
The biggest value AI provides will be in allowing our teams to focus on more complex and nuanced aspects of e-discovery, leaving the tedious tasks to AI. This shift will provide us with more time to focus on key insights within our data and formulate our legal strategies much faster, even with the growing data volumes every organization faces.
Susan Stone
Director Legal Discovery
Susan Stone
Now that we're in a new age of computational power - in terms of hardware, software, and algorithmic know-how - the range of AI-powered tools we can leverage to address complex data problems is both exciting and transformational.
Gina Taranto, PhD
Director of Applied Sciences
Gina Taranto, PhD
The integration of AI into the e-discovery landscape has already begun to transform the practice, bringing accuracy and efficiency to the massive job of finding the truth in the masses of data we are charged with parsing.
Tracey Vinson
Senior Assistant General Counsel and Director of eDiscovery
Tracey Vinson
AI is powerful, but its true impact comes from solving meaningful problems. The best solutions begin with, "How can this serve people better?" rather than, "What can we automate?"
Klara Weiand, PhD
Partner - Head of Analytics & Innovation Forensic Technology
Dr. Klara Weiand
AI will soon be deeply integrated into legal and business processes, automating routine tasks and enabling more data-driven decision-making. I anticipate the legal industry will shift toward higher-value advisory work, with privacy and AI governance playing a critical role in shaping responsible innovation.
Shannon Yavorsky
Partner, Global Chair of Data Practice, Co-head of AI
Shannon Yavorsky
