Welcoming AI into the law

"The mission is to accelerate the adoption of advanced technologies into the law," Hoque says. "We are on the cusp of what some have called a cognitive industrial revolution, where the shift from mechanical processes to AI-enhanced systems can drive innovation and enhance human decision-making in unprecedented ways."

This new career focus is a natural for Hoque, who says he has always tinkered with technology—he was an early adopter of personal digital assistants, robot vacuums, cryptocurrencies, self-driving cars and virtual reality headsets—and looked to a career in law ever since he read To Kill a Mockingbird in the third grade. "That definitely planted a seed," he said.

After law school, he worked for a decade in two large New York City law firms, advising investment banks on commercial finance transactions, before joining Moody's Investors Service. There he helped develop a scoring system for loans, and when the sheer volume of legal language in loan covenants became too much for a small group to handle, he explored machine learning tools that partially automated the analytic process.

"I started to see those two worlds collide a little bit," he says. "I love hard problems, stuff that is challenging and requires a multidisciplinary approach, and I saw that there was huge potential for machine learning in that situation."

Hoque and his wife, a California native, moved to the Bay Area during the pandemic, where he continued to work remotely for Moody's. But he soon realized he had reached the limit of his learning curve, and he started looking for a new challenge.

Sometimes timing is everything. Before AI technologies were starting to capture the public's imagination, Hoque was an early beta tester for OpenAI's system and the image generating AI called Dall-E. Hoque remembers being amazed that a simple prompt of a few lines could extrapolate on Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl; back then, none of his contacts were impressed, but he saw possibilities. "The seed was there," he says, "and if you had a little bit of imagination, you could see not just what it was but what it could be."

So he decided to go all in, establishing his consulting company to focus on the intersection between law and technology. Since then, Hoque has become deeply embedded in Silicon Valley's thriving AI ecosystem, serving as a consultant to global law firms, an advisor to legal tech startups, and an angel investor. He's developing innovative tools for law firms while helping their leaders navigate technological change. "The hardest problems aren't technical—they're about seeing around the bend and convincing successful people to embrace change," he says. "As the status quo shifts, passionate people driven by purpose will find endless opportunities."

“This is uncharted territory for the most part. It’s not for the faint of heart, and it’s not for people who are rule followers.” Which, he acknowledges, is an imperfect fit for a legal industry built on legal precedents and long-established practices. But, he says, fears that AI could someday entirely replace lawyers are overblown. More likely is that AI will take over some of the grunt work that lawyers and paralegals routinely do, freeing them for the more creative exercise of legal analysis and strategy.

"It's going to take some part of what we consider the practice of law today away from a human and make it better," Hoque says. "But that creates an opportunity for forward-thinking lawyers to elevate their practice through technology. The key is having the curiosity and initiative to tinker with these new tools and shape the future of legal practice."

"For lawyers who truly love the law," he says, "this technological revolution isn't something to fear—it's something to embrace."