By Andrew Cohen
It doesn’t take long for Berkeley Law grads to climb the ranks and make a meaningful impact early in their wide-ranging careers. We periodically highlight recent alumni who are shining across various practice areas in profiles that amplify what drew them to their current work, what they enjoy most about it, and their path to success.
A decade after earning his law degree from the University of Idaho in 2015, Anthony Shallat found himself in an unexpected place: back in law school.
Deciding to enroll in Berkeley Law’s LL.M. Program grew out of his work in technology. In 2024, while interim head of legal and senior counsel at a growth-stage startup, he had a front-row seat to how fast AI was changing the legal and business landscape.
“I was working through questions involving AI licensing, intellectual property, privacy, and product development — and often came away with more questions than answers,” Shallat says. “Leaving my job without another position lined up was a significant risk, but Berkeley’s new AI Law and Regulation Certificate felt uniquely aligned with where the profession is heading and where I wanted my career to go.”
He credits the certificate program, available to executive track LL.M. students, for giving him vital substantive knowledge, and the law school for giving him something even broader: an environment that felt like a prime incubator for ideas.
“I had the freedom to explore questions I genuinely cared about, including copyright ownership of AI-generated code, which became the subject of my own writing and an upcoming article in The Ohio State Technology Law Journal,” Shallat says. “The Berkeley name also carries meaningful credibility in the technology and business communities, and I believe the LL.M. helped employers see that I could combine legal judgment with a strong product mindset. That was important as I transitioned from a more traditional in-house legal role into work focused on building legal technology and AI products for attorneys.
“I loved my time at Berkeley. The professors were exceptional, but what I valued most was the community. I learned constantly from classmates who were practicing lawyers, business leaders, and international attorneys bringing perspectives from around the world.”
Now the product subject matter expert at Ironclad, an AI-powered contract lifecycle management platform that helps businesses manage every stage of the contracting process, Shallat helps steer that process from drafting and negotiation to signing and analysis. Contracts are not just legal documents, he notes, but infrastructure for how businesses operate.
“I work at the intersection of legal expertise and product development,” Shallat says, adding that he strives to “help translate how attorneys think, negotiate, and assess risk into products that can make their work faster and better without removing human judgment from the process.”
The right combination
At Ironclad, Shallat helps design tools that remove repetitive work while preserving the parts of lawyering that require judgment, creativity, negotiation, and experience. His goal when designing AI products isn’t to replace lawyers, but to give them more time to actually practice law.
“Anthony brings something rare to a product team: the instincts of a practicing lawyer applied to the technology reshaping the profession,” says Tapan Kamdar, his supervisor at Ironclad. “As we build AI that helps review and draft contracts, the hardest question is whether the output reflects how a skilled attorney would actually reason, and that’s the judgment Anthony supplies.”
Shallat’s work, Kamdar explains, ensures that the platforms and AI agents Ironclad builds earn lawyers’ trust: “It’s consequential work, shaping the systems that thousands of other lawyers will rely on, and he’s the right person to do it.”
Shallat is also a strategic adviser at Vessel, a software company working to eliminate supply chain friction points for U.S. manufacturers. He guides Vessel’s AI and procurement strategy from a legal compliance and go-to-market lens while confronting questions around product design, legal risk, contracting, and how AI capabilities fit into the needs of enterprise customers.
He previously was the product manager, founding account manager, and legal counsel at Streamline AI, an AI-native legal operations and contract platform serving in-house legal teams, and head of legal at Branch Metrics, a unicorn adtech startup. Shallat helped align Branch’s product, legal, and go-to-market teams, leading the company through a period of organizational transformation and product innovation.
Earlier, he spent three years at a firm in Boise and three more at a firm he co-founded in San Francisco (now Fisher Hudson Brown and Horton), advising startups and other entities on tech transactions, legal infrastructure, and commercialization strategies.
“My interest in AI came from seeing it move from something experimental to something that was affecting my work almost every day,” Shallat says. “Over time, I realized I didn’t just want to advise companies about AI. I wanted to help build the products attorneys themselves would use.”
For lawyers in particular, he believes that while the specifics of their work may change substantially, qualities like judgment, experience, empathy, persuasion, and accountability will be more important, not less.
“AI is going to become increasingly embedded in the workplace. I don’t think we’re going backward from that,” Shallat says. “The myth is that this necessarily means eliminating human expertise. In many areas, I think the opposite will be true. AI still has significant limitations, edge cases, and gaps in judgment. As these systems become more capable, we’ll need people with deep subject-matter expertise to train them, evaluate their outputs, establish appropriate boundaries, and decide when the technology should — or should not — be trusted.”