About Rex Anderson

Two careers.  One increasingly important intersection.

Rex has worked with software and computer systems since 1977. Before becoming an attorney, he spent a decade working as a systems analyst, programmer, and software specialist. He has continued designing and building technology throughout his professional life, from business and information systems to today's AI-powered applications, agentic systems, process automations, and knowledge-retrieval systems.

He also practiced law for 30 years, including in federal court, served as managing partner of a mid-sized law firm, and later spent approximately 15 years operating his own practice. During his legal career, he earned Martindale-Hubbell’s AV Preeminent® rating, its highest peer-review distinction for legal ability and ethical standards.

Those two paths were never entirely separate.

When Rex opened his own firm in 2005, he designed it as a 100% virtual law practice from its first day, years before the model became commonplace. He designed, built and used his own cloud base law firm case-management system before today's major cloud practice-management platforms existed. By 2007, he was running core firm systems on a dedicated remote server at a time when most law firms still expected their critical software and data to reside on a physical server in the office store room.

Technology was never simply something Rex advised others about. He used it to rethink how his own professional work could be organized, managed, and delivered.

Today, those two long-running paths converge around AI.

AI is not simply another software tool entering the legal profession. As its capabilities become more ordinary, it can affect how work is performed, how lawyers and staff are enabled and supervised, how firms allocate professional time, what clients expect, how services are priced, where new risks arise, and what firm leadership must understand well enough to make sound decisions.

Those questions cannot be examined entirely from the technology side.

And they cannot be examined entirely from the legal side.

A law firm should not have to explain the practice of law to its technology advisor, or explain the technology to someone who understands only law.

Rex's work sits between those two worlds, grounded in decades of experience with both.

Judgment before technology

Most conversations about AI begin with a product.

Which model should the firm use? Which workflow should it automate? Which platform should it purchase? What should lawyers be allowed to do?

Those may become important questions. They are rarely the first ones.

Rex begins with the particular decision or challenge the firm actually faces and examines it in the context of the firm itself: its lawyers, clients, economics, professional responsibilities, operations, existing systems, and leadership priorities.

Sometimes the right response is adoption.

Sometimes it is experimentation.

Sometimes it is greater control or supervision.

Sometimes a development that looks important from the technology industry deserves very little attention from a law-firm leader.

The objective is not to accelerate AI use for its own sake. It is to help leadership distinguish consequential change from noise and make decisions that remain sensible after the novelty of the technology has passed.

A continuing study of the changing law firm

Rex also publishes AI Adoption Intelligence for Law Firm Leadership, a weekly intelligence brief of the specific developments in AI that may actually matter to people responsible for managing law firms.

The publication reflects the same approach he brings to advisory work: look broadly, discard what is not consequential, examine what remains, and ask what it means inside an actual law firm.

His longer Field Notes explore individual issues that deserve deeper consideration.

Together, that work reflects a broader professional interest Rex has followed across much of his career:

What happens to professional work when the technology underneath it changes?

Today, AI makes that question unusually consequential for the legal profession.