Meet Paul Gaskell: Avantia's new Chief Technology Officer

Following his recent appointment as CTO at Avantia Law, our VP of Marketing, Laurence Baker, sat down with Paul Gaskell to discuss the future of AI and his impressive career journey.

Q: Welcome Paul, you've recently joined the team at Avantia. What appealed to you the most?  

I have a friend who is a huge fan of Avantia. He’s really impressed with what they were doing and convinced me to speak to the team!

I've met a lot of people at C Level, across organisations of various different sizes and scales, and when I met with James he instantly came across as somebody who really knows what he's talking about. We discussed his experiences with technology and the vision he had from a tech perspective.

From there I met the team and straight away it felt like there was a really interesting leadership for the business, and I could see how it had become so successful. There was the understanding that there is a very big, very exciting technology play that you can make here, but it's not just going, “let's throw it all in, ChatGPT and see what we get”, it’s actually solving the nuance of the problem these firms and lawyers are facing.

That’s the piece that really grabbed me – we’re at the beginning of a huge transformation in the industry and Avantia is leading the charge.

Q: Lets talk a bit about your background, you've made a career out of building cutting edge tech solutions for private markets. What does that journey look like?  

After university I worked as an analyst programmer in a small consultancy firm in London – writing some code, and doing analytics. I got bored quite quickly and decided to go back to Uni to do a PhD. I was actually offered a job as a software developer at IBM, which my parents were very keen for me to accept, but to their dismay, I thought the PhD would be more exciting!

My PhD was in web science, and it was a joint venture between the computer science department and my other supervisors in finance. The basis of the study was to discover how online information is impacting financial services.

During this time, we were just getting big data coming in. I was in there when all these technologies were becoming popularised and loads of data was being scraped off the web. We had a few partners, and together, we were trying to establish whether there was any financially relevant information online.

Once I’d completed my PhD it was around the time financial services companies were testing automation using natural language processing. This led me to work with Bloomberg and then at Blackrock. At Bloomberg, I started a data science team where we were building out their natural language processing platforms and understanding what was possible via automation. And then, at BlackRock, I started the team that was responsible for building the AI platform that underpins BlackRock’s private markets technology offering via the Aladdin and Efront/Insight brands.

Q: Very impressive! In that case you should be perfectly placed to answer my next question... Over the last couple of years, AI has become a buzzword that everyone uses, but where do you actually see the impact of this in the legal services side?  

I think it’s important to remember what the tech behind the latest AI wave really does. The current state-of-the-art in AI are algorithms that can fit extremely flexible functions to data. This means you can feed them billions of training examples and they are able to mimic what a training example looks like when given a prompt.

What they can’t do is reason about why the data is the way it is, and what causal mechanisms made it that way. For example, I could train an AI system to return a picture of an elephant every time you prompted it with the word “elephant” and it would look like I had created an AI system that understands what an elephant is. But equally, I could have trained the same system to return a picture of a carrot when prompted “elephant” or a cup, or the entire works of Shakespeare.

Understanding this is the key to understanding the impact of AI on any profession. For legal services, there are clearly places where being able to mimic or replicate prior processes is hugely beneficial. Lawyers spend a lot of time remembering what market is for the term of a non-solicit, or finding precedent for accepting certain contract language, which are prime examples of tasks you can complete well with AI.

However, there are places where a person will still need to take the lead. For example where a contract negotiation requires understanding the commercial imperatives of both your client and the counterparty of a deal. This requires understanding intent and context in a way AI cannot.

So, for now, assume for arguments sake half the load on lawyers is process and remembering and half is understanding clients and making value judgements. I think companies who do well over the next 5-10 years will work out how to use AI to reduce the former and allow lawyers to concentrate on the latter.

Q: Last question, what do you do in your free time?

I think everyone would roll their eyes if I said reading the latest AI research papers and keeping my hand in at coding… but I also have a wonderful family I love spending time away from the screen with, and also taking my German Shepherd Jessie out for long walks!