Al Hounsell

About Al Hounsell

Al Hounsell runs AI, innovation and knowledge for Gowling WLG from Toronto, as the firm's Senior Director, AI Innovation & Knowledge. The work is about finding new ways to serve clients, and Al draws on legal training, experience as an entrepreneur and work as a full-stack software and web developer. In practice that's meant automating documents and workflows, running legal operations, building AI into legal processes and bringing design thinking to how legal work gets done.

Code came before law. Al first made a name in web development and started several businesses, then switched careers through the joint JD/MBA program that Osgoode Hall Law School runs with the Schulich School of Business, and was called to the Ontario bar in 2016. Al spent over ten years at Norton Rose Fulbright, the last stretch as director of strategic innovation and legal design. In that role Al headed a mixed team of lawyers, developers, legal engineers and operations specialists, streamlining legal operations for the firm itself and for its clients. Gowling WLG brought Al over in November 2024.

Teaching runs alongside the day job. Al went back to Osgoode in 2022 to teach and is now an adjunct professor there and at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, covering legal innovation, AI and technology. Engineering the Law, a course Al taught at Osgoode, gave students practice turning contracts and legislation into decision trees and using design thinking on legal problems. Al also sits on the Ontario Bar Association's AI Task Force.

Having lived through an earlier round of legal AI hype and the letdown that came after it, Al still sees generative AI as a different animal, one that's going to change what lawyers do in a big way. It's well suited to rote work that's highly structured and predictable. And in Al's view, people tend to expect too much from AI in the short run and too little over the long run.