Gareth Middleton

Director of Innovation & Software Engineering @Holland & Hart LLP • building AI tools for law • PhD from Rice ECE

Here’s a PDF version of my resume.

About Me

Experienced technical innovator pursuing opportunities in leadership and product development, with emphasis on leveraging the capabilities of generative AI to empower organizations at all levels. Proven record of engineering project management, execution, and customer success. Self-directed and reliable, with strong leadership and teamwork skills, delivering results and advancing business interests in diverse and challenging environments.

Relevant Experience

Holland & Hart, LLP - Director of Innovation and Software Engineering

Jun 2023 - present

Leading the Innovation Lab, a team of software and solutions engineers tasked with developing, deploying, and maintaining custom technology tools to automate the legal workflow. Responsible for prioritizing efforts, communicating between engineers and non-technical firm members, and determining the firm’s innovation roadmap. Furthering state-of-the-art technology at all levels, from cloud infrastructure to software design.

Holland & Hart, LLP - Principal Data Scientist

Sep 2017 - Jun 2023

Lead a team within the firm’s Innovation Lab to bring the benefits of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to the legal practice. Plan and scope projects with stakeholders, establish technical roadmap, execute with a team of data scientists. Responsible for ensuring data security and integrity, and maintaining functionality of software products.

Select Projects

Deployment of Generative AI - Standalone and plugin applications bringing AI to the legal workflow

Mar 2023 - present. Firm-wide reach

Developed and deployed a suite of LLM-powered technology assistants for the legal practice. Ensured data integrity and security best practices, and assisted with user & supervisor training.

Juvo Legal Technology Platform - Rapid delivery of legal automation solutions

Mar 2019 - present. Firm-wide reach

Coordinated and contributed to the development of Juvo, a firm-wide technology delivery platform for legal automation. Juvo hosts over 50 applications used by more than 150 users, processing more than 2000 automation actions per day.

Legal Continuous Learning Platform - Automatic ETL, Dynamic Model Training, Validation, and Deployment

Dec 2019 - present. Firm-wide reach.

Developing a suite of technologies to automatically gather training data from employees executing the legal process, causing automation models to be trained, validated and deployed dynamically. Allows rapid scaling of ML tools across the firm with minimum developer effort. Technology deployed in Azure AKS, with data stored and indexed in CosmosDB.

Large Scale Patent Indexing - Transformers for Semantic Search

Sep 2021 - Dec 2021. Powers revenue-generating product.

Developed tools to gather and process over 30 million patent specifications and make them available for semantic search. NLP search tasks leverage transformer models, with index quantization for lightweight cloud deployment. Technology developed and deployed in Amazon AWS. Executed with the Juris Futura team.

Skills

  • Leadership and Project Management / Execution
  • Team Building and Development
  • Written and Oral Communication
  • Customer Interaction and Business Development

Technical

  • Applied Mathematics, Probability and Statistics
  • Large Scale Data Processing
  • Software Orchestration with Kubernetes
  • Python, C/C++, Javascript, POSIX shells, REST APIs
  • Docker, k8s, Helm, ELK, git

Education

  • PhD Electrical Engineering, Rice University 2011
  • MSEE, Rice University 2007
  • BSEE & BA, Rice University, magna cum laude 2005