Jay Mandal (Stanford CodeX) and John Ferro (Jus Mundi) on AI in Legal Practice

This talk brings together different perspectives on building AI in the legal domain. Jay Mandal brings his perspective on working at the intersection of law, product, and AI as an academic and entrepreneur. John Ferro shares how Jus Mundi approached modelling arbitration-specific legal data to support more effective research and retrieval. The session surfaces the different challenges that arise depending on where you sit—whether you’re structuring data, building models, or thinking about deployment and impact.

Jay Mandal is a Fellow at CodeX and Guest Lecturer at Stanford University. He’s the Chief Product Officer at Theo AI, a startup that recently raised $4.2M to forecast the outcomes of legal disputes. Jay has previously led product and strategy at SAP, including as COO of its Data & AI group and VP of Product Strategy at Ariba. He co-founded LawPivot, a legal tech startup backed by Sequoia and acquired by Rocket Lawyer. Before that, he was Apple’s lead M&A attorney, where he led key strategic deals and acquisitions behind the original iPad and iPhone.

John Ferro is a Tech Lead at Jus Mundi, based in Paris. He has worked in engineering and product roles at 2txt, Brandtale, and CampusKudos, focusing on building and scaling software. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Georgetown University.

The talk was delivered at the lightning talks conference accompanying the 2025 LLMxLaw Hackathon, organised by King's E-Lab in collaboration with Cambridge Judge Business School and CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.

🔹 About the King’s E-Lab: At the E-Lab we aim to encourage entrepreneurial thinking, build venture acumen, nurture a social ethic, and create a space for students, researchers and other stakeholders to explore innovation for positive social and environmental change. In four years, the E-Lab has developed a core set of activities to support these objectives, structured under three pillars: Education; Research and Community. These activities, as displayed in our impact statement here: https://www.kingselab.org/impact, demonstrate the delivery of strong outcomes and the possibilities of a sustainable set of programming to the benefit of King’s, the Cambridge community, and the wider world.

🎟 Upcoming events can be found at: https://www.kingselab.org/events

🗓 Subscribe to E-Lab’s newsletter here for priority access: https://www.kingselab.org/stay-in-touch