A lawyer since 2002 and a coder since 1985, Damien clerked for the chief judges of state and federal courts, spent roughly 15 years in legal practice and complex litigation, has led teams of cybersecurity and world-spanning digital forensics investigations, and for the past decade has built AI-backed legal software.
If there is one through-line, it is access to justice — using law, code, and even music to lower the barriers between people and the help they need.
Legal AI tools
At Clio — which combines the Business of Law and Practice of Law (including Vincent, Clio Work, Fastcase, and Docket Alarm) — Damien helps expand various products, integrating AI-backed technologies into a billion-document dataset from 100+ countries, all to improve legal workflows.
Legal data standards
With FOLIO, the legal ontology project from the ALEA Institute, Damien helps corporations, their law firms, and legal-technology vendors implement legal data standards. For years, Damien led SALI, the legal data standard, where he 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.
Autonomous vehicles + AI for access to justice
Co-Chair of the Minnesota Governor’s Council on Connected and Automated Vehicles, Damien is helping recommend changes to Minnesota statutes, rules, and policies — all related to connected and autonomous vehicles. He is Chair of the Minnesota State Bar Association’s AI Committee, which oversees an AI Sandbox to promote Access to Justice (A2J). Damien is also working with courts nationwide (e.g., Colorado, Arizona, Louisiana) on how AI can improve access-to-justice initiatives.
AI alignment with “human values”
Damien has met at the Vatican with Catholic leaders around the world, discussing how artificial intelligence will transform society and people of faith. Since then, Damien has actively contributed to technology projects — providing computer code in open-source projects — as well as serving among the leaders of the newly formed Catholic Digital Commons Foundation, which is providing free and open-source tools to people of faith around the world.
All the Music
Damien founded the All the Music project, which copyrighted — and then gave away — over 471 billion melodies. After computationally composing every melody that has ever existed, and can ever exist, Damien put everything into the public domain (CC0), helping protect “you stole my melody” lawsuit defendants. Separately, in 2020 he founded Schola Diffusa, a virtual choir with singers on six continents.
“This guy [Damien] rocks!”— Elon Musk (back in 2023)