AI for Legal Research: Why Data Matters

Carlos is the Senior Director of Innovation for Thomson Reuters’ Legal Business. In his role, he partners with different people inside and outside of the enterprise to define the innovation strategy, and to execute innovation priorities through strategic projects with the potential to drive organic growth. Projects include: running ideation and innovation campaigns and challenges, defining and funding collaborative research opportunities, advising on and performing proof of concepts, and developing and leveraging relationships for co-creation with customers and industry partners.

Carlos joined Thomson Reuters under its leadership development program where he performed roles across Strategy and Product Strategy. After the program, he served as the Chief of Staff to the General Counsel and as the lead for legal department operations. Later, he was also part of the Corporate Development group, where he led the evaluation and execution of acquisitions of companies. Prior to joining Thomson Reuters, he worked with start-ups in different capacities in Silicon Valley.

Before that, he practiced intellectual property law in one of Mexico’s leading law firms. Carlos has a Bachelors in Law (LL.B.) from the Facultad Libre de Derecho de Monterrrey (Mexico), and obtained an LL.M. at Stanford Law School and an MBA at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Don MacLeod is the Manager of Knowledge Management at Debevoise & Plimpton.

Tonya Custis is a Research Director at Thomson Reuters where she leads a team of Research Scientists performing applied research in Artificial Intelligence technologies. Thomson Reuters is a Platinum Partner in Canada’s Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and is in the process of growing TR’s Toronto-based Centre for Cognitive Computing AI research group to 100 people by 2018.

Tonya’s diverse academic background – a Ph.D. & M.A. in Linguistics, an M.S. in Computer Science, and a B.A. in Music – has shaped her research interests, which primarily include natural language processing, machine learning, and information retrieval. She is currently leading projects that explore Question Answering and Natural Language Understanding in the Legal domain.

Previously, as a Senior Principal Data Scientist for Honeywell, Tonya developed machine-learned predictive models to improve voice-controlled and other IoT and aerospace products. Her work as a Senior Machine Learning Scientist for eBay focused on search results ranking, query parsing, inventory prediction, and product classification. As a Research Scientist at Thomson Reuters from 2004-2011, Tonya worked on many NLP and machine learning projects, including Concept Search and non-English stemming & decompounding in 8 languages. From 2007 to 2016, while not working, she played competitive roller derby.