About the Firm
I founded Vining Legal PLLC to help bridge the gap between law and large language models.
We operate in two distinct areas:
We provide traditional legal services focused on technology transactions and licensing, delivered through conventional human review or supported by VL's AI tools (client’s choice).
We help clients evaluate and improve their own LLM implementations using structured legal frameworks.
I’m not a software engineer, but my career has centered on translating complicated concepts between technical and business teams. First, in Biglaw negotiating technology transactions, later working in-house on complex licensing deals, and most recently (during my last in-house role) leading implementation of a contract lifecycle management platform with an integrated LLM.
As the CLM project unfolded, I began to notice a strong “garbage in, garbage out” pattern and realized that creating an AI solution reliable enough for our team would require someone who deeply understood our unique legal and business context to build the right foundation for us.
Having worked on both sides - negotiating complex licensing deals and implementing AI tools for legal work - I saw an opportunity to help legal teams develop and implement frameworks to translate their expertise into a foundation for more reliable AI, while preserving human judgment.
Vining Legal operates independently as a law firm. Its sister company, Simplify Legal Intelligence (SLI), offers legal data structuring and other AI workflow consulting services to complement and support VL’s LLM evaluation and improvement practice. Together, the two aim to deliver comprehensive foundation data tailored to each unique LLM use case. More details available here.
About Me
Photo Credit: Billy Hathorn at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
I’m from Andrews, Texas, an oil field town of 10,000 people in the Permian Basin. I learned everything I know about determination and resourcefulness from two remarkable women: my grandmother, who single-handedly ran a bakery and floral shop for nearly forty years while raising four daughters alone, and my mother, who became a licensed cosmetologist as a teenager to support us after having me at sixteen. I’m a first-generation college graduate, and I have both of them to thank for it.
I earned a BA in Psychology from Baylor University in 2006 and a JD from Wake Forest University School of Law in 2009, where I served on the Journal of Business and Intellectual Property Law, and I’ve been licensed to practice in Texas since 2009.
I began my legal career at Locke Lord (now Troutman Pepper Locke), later transitioning to in-house counsel at Match Group. My practice matured significantly at McDermott Will & Emery, where I was fortunate enough to learn complex technology transactions from world-class lawyers.
Later, while serving as Assistant General Counsel at Pindrop, I discovered a passion for applied AI while working to implement an AI-powered contract management system – an experience that ultimately inspired me to found Vining Legal PLLC and its sister company, Simplify Legal Intelligence.
Today, I live near White Rock Lake in Dallas with my fiancée Samantha and our two dogs, Charlie and Pepper.