LEGAL AGENTS! Using both (1) LLMs and (2) Symbolic AI (GOFAI) to Help Lawyers (and Everyone) Access Justice
by Damien Riehl | at Minnebar 19
Today’s legal system runs on unstructured data: millions of statutes, cases, contracts, and regulations that are overwhelmingly complex. But structuring that data (e.g., Knowledge Graphs), and combining LLMs, can extract insights, automate workflows, and ultimately help everyone (including the poor) access justice.
A 20+ year veteran lawyer (and mediocre coder), Damien Riehl, will break down how hybrid legal agents — combining LLMs and Symbolic AI (GOFAI) — can perform substantive legal tasks at scale: writing legal memos, tagging facts, building arguments, comparing cases, surfacing legal standards, and even advising judges. The session will explore Knowledge Graphs, deterministic tagging, and open-source standards that bring structure to legal chaos.
You’ll see live demos, real-world implementations, and open-source tools you can use today. If you’re building anything involving words, this talk will show how hybrid, neuro-symbolic agents help tame hallucinations, favoring RAG-backed reasoning.
Want to see how LLM-backed legal tools — with a billion legal docs — are built? Join us!
Damien Riehl
Damien Riehl is a lawyer and technologist with experience in complex litigation, digital forensics, and software development. A coder since 1985 and for the web since 1995, Damien clerked for the chief judges of state and federal courts, practiced in complex litigation for over a decade, has led teams of cybersecurity and world-spanning digital forensics investigations, and has led teams in legal-software development.
Co-Chair of the Minnesota Governor’s Council on Connected and Automated Vehicles, he is helping recommend changes to Minnesota statutes, rules, and policies — all related to connected and autonomous vehicles.
Damien is Chair of the Minnesota State Bar Association's working group on AI and the Unauthorized Practice of Law (UPL).
At SALI, the legal data standard he led for years, Damien developed and greatly expanded the taxonomy of over 18,000 legal tags that matter, helping the legal industry's development of Generative AI, analytics, and interoperability.
At vLex Group — which includes Fastcase, NextChapter, and Docket Alarm — Damien helps lead the design, development, and expansion of various products, integrating AI-backed technologies (e.g., GPT) to improve legal workflows and to power legal data analytics.
In 2019, Damien gave a TEDx Talk about his All the Music project, which to date has computationally composed over 400,000,000,000 (400B) melodies, has written them to disc (fixed in a tangible medium), and has given the public access through Creative Commons Zero (CC0), which provides rights similar to rights to works in the Public Domain. Arguably improving copyright law through legal decisions that appeared to draw upon his TEDx Talk's arguments.
“This guy [Damien] rocks!” - Elon Musk
Links:
- Twitter: @damienriehl
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