Georgetown Law

Professor Mulcahy co-teaches practicum courses on how to design and build legal expert systems, which are software applications that engage users in a dialogue and provide situation-specific guidance based on rules defined by legal experts. Commercial legal expert systems designed and built by Professor Mulcahy include Littler Healthcare Reform Advisor and The Family and Medical Leave Advisor. He is a co-author of Thinking Like a Lawyer, Designing Like an Architect: Preparing Students for the 21st Century Practice, 88 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 743 (2013) with Tanina Rostain and Roger Skalbeck.

In his courses, Professor Mulcahy shows students how to apply engineering principles to legal problems and guides the students as they design and build online tools that deliver high-quality, personalized guidance quickly and efficiently. Each course culminates in an “Iron Tech Lawyer” competition, in which student teams present their apps to a panel of judges. His courses have received extensive media coverage, including reports by PBS Nightly Business Report, the National Law Journal, and many legal tech blogs.

Professor Mulcahy graduated from Duke Law School with high honors where he won the school’s Dean’s Cup Moot Court Championship. He practiced law at Donovan Leisure Newton & Irvine in New York City as a litigation associate and did pro bono work for the Brooklyn DA’s Office, writing appellate briefs and arguing appellate cases. He then formed a consulting practice in which he used his legal advocacy skills to help corporations improve the precision and persuasiveness of their communications. He wrote speeches and directed many training and media projects for Fortune 500 companies including McGraw-Hill, Unilever, Pfizer, Merck, Citibank, Chase, Coca-Cola, Disney, and Johnson & Johnson. With his unique combination of legal and communication expertise, he joined Jnana Technologies, a pioneer in the field of legal expert systems, and created systems for Thomson (legal audit tools), CCH (tax advisors), and Bankrate.com (personal finance advisors that averaged 20,000 sessions daily). Today, at Neota Logic, Professor Mulcahy works with large law firms, legal publishers, and corporations that want to leverage their expertise and meet the growing demand for automated delivery of customized guidance.