The Fastcase 50 class of 2016 includes the retirement of some legends, the entry of a new class of legal tech entrepreneurs, and some noteworthy advocates for open government. The past year was a time of great change – from law schools to firms, from in-house lawyers to the government. That change can be daunting or discouraging, and that’s one reason that our team enjoys celebrating the accomplishments of the Fastcase 50. These are people who inspire us by their intelligence, creativity, and leadership. We hope they will inspire others as well. Once again, you submitted some spectacular nominations, and we are pleased to honor the Fastcase 50 Class of 2016.

…

Michael Genesereth
Associate Professor of Computer Science, Stanford
The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics (CodeX, for short) is the Woodstock for legal technology — some of the most interesting projects in legal tech have come from, or through, CodeX, which Michael Genesereth directs (with fellow Fastcase 50 honoree Roland Vogl). At a time when artificial intelligence has captured the collective imagination of legal tech, Genesereth has literally written the book on it — The Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, and he teaches a class in Legal Informatics at Stanford Law School. Genesereth is a Swiss army knife of the tech world, combining work on Computational Logic and applications of that work in Enterprise Management, Electronic Commerce, and Computational Law. Genesereth serves as the director of the Stanford Logic Group, and was one of the founders of Teknowledge, CommerceNet, and Mergent Systems.

…

Roland Vogl
Executive Director, Stanford CodeX
Although Roland’s “credit line” indicates that he is executive director of CodeX, that is only a very small part of his activities aimed toward building a new way to look at and use legal information. After early stints with the European Commission and the European Parliament, Roland began the United States phase of his career in California. He joined Stanford in 2003, where he became head of the Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology. Five years later he became the executive director of CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and a hotbed of legal innovation. Within Stanford he spearheaded the development of the Stanford Intellectual Property Exchange (SIPIX), which addressed content licensing issues in legal education and was eventually spun off from Stanford. In his work at Stanford, Roland has had as his aim what has become the aim of CodeX: “[T]o advance the frontier of legal technology, bringing new levels of legal efficiency, transparency, and access to legal systems around the world.”