May 26, 2016

From Coding to Contracts: Ansel Halliburton Named to Daily Journal 40 Under 40

With his background in computer science and in-depth knowledge of Silicon Valley, Ansel Halliburton has already made a significant impact in the field of internet law. This year, his achievements have been recognized by the Daily Journal, honoring him on the “40 Under 40” list.

A programmer since the age of 10, Halliburton has combined his interest in coding with his passion for law to develop software that makes lawyers’ lives easier. In 2006, along with a group at Stanford University, he developed Lex Machina, which provides analytics on intellectual property litigation. Lex Machina was acquired by LexisNexis in 2015. Earlier this year, Halliburton was also honored with an award from DC Legal Hackers for co-developing Common Form, an open source software project for writing contracts. “Programmers have great tools for writing software,” Halliburton said. “There was nothing similar for drafting legal documents. Common Form lets you build more structured documents, detects errors, and encourages contract drafting best practices.”

His coding experience also gives him unusual insight into cases, to the benefit of clients such as PhantomALERT, which is suing Google and the mobile navigation app Waze for having allegedly stolen PhantomALERT’s points of interest database. After his client noted anomalies in Waze’s results, Halliburton investigated further, and was able to identify evidence by comparing large data sets in each project.

Thanks to his skill set and background, Halliburton has already made several marks on the legal industry, with many more to come.

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