Rex Anderson is a retired attorney and founder of Desert Sage AI. He advises managing partners and firm leaders on AI governance and responsible adoption.

For three decades, he practiced real estate and bankruptcy law in federal court, eventually serving as managing partner, then opening own firm. That work shaped his understanding of professional risk in a specific way: clarity about authority matters more than sophistication about tools. When something goes wrong in a professional firm, the question is never just what happened. It is who was responsible, what standard applied, and whether the firm's decision-making process can withstand scrutiny.

Alongside his legal career, Rex spent decades in software and systems work, building and advising on technology infrastructure for professional organizations. That background means he can read both sides of the AI adoption question: the governance obligations that professional firms carry, and the operational realities that make those obligations difficult to meet.

Most conversations about AI begin with tools: which model to use, which workflow to automate, which platform to deploy. Rex's work begins earlier.

Before AI systems influence client work, professional advice, or internal operations, someone at the leadership level needs to be able to answer a more fundamental question: who owns the consequences of this system, and under what standard?

He works with managing partners to surface where AI is already affecting work product, clarify decision authority, and build policies that reflect the firm's actual professional obligations rather than vendor marketing or informal experimentation. His engagements are structured and time-limited, designed to produce leadership clarity before AI use expands further.