How this ex GC's frustration with legal software turned into a startup

Guest: Brent Farese
Role: CEO and Co-Founder, Aline
Website: aline.co

This episode is brought to you by Aline. Try Aline’s trusted and verified legal AI today for free.

I spoke with Brent Farese, CEO and co-founder of Aline, an agentic legal AI platform built exclusively for in-house teams.

Brent trained as an IP attorney with a mechanical engineering and computer science background, then worked as Assistant General Counsel one of the world’s leading enterprise blockchain companies.

We discussed:

→ The three tiers of document search (keyword, semantic, agentic) and why getting this right is the hard engineering problem nobody talks about
→ Why legal AI is roughly two years behind agentic coding — and what infrastructure still needs to be built before it catches up
→ Why frontier model providers entering legal is actually a tailwind for specialist platforms
→Why making legal work cheaper and faster is likely to produce more legal work, not less
→ Why “building the GitHub for law”, with proper version control, is needed in 2026.

I hope you enjoy listening just as much as I did recording it.

Want to feature in the next Best Practice podcast? Email george@georgehannah.com