Legal Geek Presents Thomson Reuters Takeover

Rawia Ashraf, Senior Director, Legal Practice and Productivity

Rawia develops customer-driven legal software that helps attorneys get their jobs done. Previously, Rawia led Thomson Reuters’ Practical Law product strategy, guiding the investment and growth process. Before joining Thomson Reuters, Rawia practiced antitrust law at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, in both New York and DC. She is a graduate of Cornell Law School and the University of Maryland. Outside of work, Rawia is active with Food Bank for New York City and other nonprofits focusing on women and income inequality.

Carolyn Bussey, Senior User Researcher

Carolyn focusses on user research: their processes and needs, is at the intersection of product development, psychology, and anthropology. She has spent a great deal of time watching people use Westlaw. That makes her a bit like Indiana Jones – just replace “exploring hidden temples” with “watching people use TR products”. You may wonder why anyone would sign up for this type of work. While ‘legal work’ can be procedural and repetitive, many issues are also nuanced and contextual. Finding the right way to bring technology into the mix is not easy – Carolyn’s work is to ensure that products are understandable, useful, and focused on the things that matter. And that is always fascinating.

Elizabeth Duffy, Senior Director, Global Client Services

Lizzy and her team of subject matter experts are responsible for delivering insights to clients and connecting the dots between the data and a client’s business, drawing from Acritas, part of Thomson Reuters independent research programs – Sharplegal, Stellar Performance – and custom-built research programs. She regularly leads custom research projects including client review and thought leadership programs and presents research results to the management boards and partnerships of AmLaw 50 firms. Now based in the UK, Lizzy spent eight years as head of Acritas US in New York and misses brunch greatly.

Andrew Fletcher, Director, TR Labs

Dr. Andrew Fletcher is a Director with Thomson Reuters Labs™, based in London. He founded the London Labs team, comprised of data scientists, designers and engineers, in 2016 and since then has run a variety of projects across Legal, Tax and Risk. Andrew has a PhD and Masters in Chemistry from the University of Oxford, and before Thomson Reuters worked at Imperial College London within the innovation department who studied the approaches to innovation taken by many of the world’s leading companies.

Steve Fullerton, Software Product Manager

Steve has been delivering software solutions and new products to the legal market for almost twenty years, ten with Thomson Reuters, covering legal research, know how, current awareness and document analysis. He has a passion for innovation, integrating content and technologies and using machine learning techniques to advance the tools lawyers use every day.

Nadja Herger, Data Scientist

Nadja Herger is a Data Scientist at Thomson Reuters Labs, based in Switzerland. She is primarily focusing on Deep Learning and interactions between humans and AI. Within the Labs she has contributed to various NLP projects in the legal and news domains, applying her skills to text classification, metadata extraction, and summarization tasks. Before joining Thomson Reuters, she obtained her Ph.D. in Climate Science from the University of New South Wales, Australia. Prior to that, she completed her MSc and BSc in Environmental Sciences at ETH Zurich.

Jim Leason, Vice President, Customer Proposition

Jim is responsible for defining strategic priorities, designing customer offerings, and owning proposition strategy across the Legal Professionals Europe customer base, and for the delivery of our court management solutions platform. He has been with Thomson Reuters for 12 years, initially as a member of the General Counsel department where Jim became Chief Counsel of the Governance, Risk and Compliance business/Risk. He joined Thomson Reuters in 2006 after a career in private practice in the City at Stephenson Harwood, and then Kemp Little.

Tom MacDonald, Product Manager

Tom is a product manager at HighQ. He is responsible for the project management and workflow automation capabilities on the platform. Tom has been working with legal tech for over 10 years at HighQ, Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis with a focus on productivity software.

Masoud Makrehchi, Director, Research

Masoud Makrehchi is a research director at the Thomson Reuter Labs   and an associate professor at the OntarioTech University in Toronto. He received his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada.  His current primary research interests are in the areas of text mining, natural language processing, legal analytics, machine learning, and application of AI in law and ethics. Masoud is a Professional Engineer in Ontario, senior IEEE member, and adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa, Tefler School of Management.

Milda Norkute, Senior Designer

Milda Norkute is a Senior Designer at Thomson Reuters Labs in Zug, Switzerland, one of several labs worldwide. She works closely with data scientists and engineers on enhancing products and services across Thomson Reuters product portfolio with Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions. Milda is focused on user research and design of the products to figure out how and where to put the human in the loop in AI powered systems, including prototyping with front end development. Before joining Thomson Reuters Milda worked at Nokia and CERN. Milda holds a masters in Human Computer Interaction and a bachelors degree in Psychology.

Mark Reynolds, Lead Consultant, Legal Professionals Europe

Mark Reynolds is possibly the original legal geek, having delivered countless solutions resolving transactional, litigation and other legal service challenges for law firms and corporate legal teams for over 2 decades. Mark was critical in evolving HighQ’s solution in the client tech landscape as the features of the platform evolved. That journey continues as the demands of the market place gather pace and sophistication. Prior to delivering this for HighQ clients, this involved working for law firms including Clifford Chance, King Wood Mallesons and Allens Linklaters in the UK and Australia.

Hedy Xu, Product Manager

Hedy is part of the product management team in Thomson Reuters, delivering brand new capability on machine learning-assisted contract analysis. Previously, she worked in strategy and in the Practical Law product team, looking out for new product and customer opportunities. Before joining Thomson Reuters she worked in the innovation office and strategy team in Refinitiv. Hedy is passionate about product innovation/design solving real user problems. She has an academic background in AI and a keen interest in the application of advanced technology, including AI/ML and robotic automation process.

Eric J. Wood, Practice Innovations and Technology Partner, Chapman and Cutler

Eric works across the firm’s offices and practice groups to research, design and develop legal technology tools for Chapman’s attorneys and clients. His experience includes designing custom transaction management and contract analysis software, developing document automation systems, building legal expert systems, coding interactive data visualizations of transactional metadata and leading numerous service design, process optimization and knowledge management initiatives. Eric draws on significant prior experience in financial transactions, previously working in the Banking and Financial Services Department at Chapman and the Capital Markets group at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in New York. Before attending law school, he worked on legal technology and access to justice projects as an AmeriCorps VISTA Volunteer for Wyoming Legal Services.