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Pioneer of Law Technology

Michael Mills 鈥�69

October 1, 2023 in California, of complications from leukemia.

Michael Mills, innovator, mentor, and leading global figure in law firm technology, died at 77, with his life partner, Karen MacNeil, at his side.

His career spanned legal technology, litigation, and local television. Since 2011, he was the cofounder and president of Neota, a no-code platform for intelligent automation.

“Law has lost a visionary strategist, an imaginative practitioner, and a business leader,” said Liam Brown, the chairman and CEO of Elevate Law. “We have all lost an extraordinary friend.”

Harris Tilevitz, of global law firm Skadden, described Michael as “kind, unassuming, gentle, brilliant, and someone you want to be like.”

Michael was born in 1946 in Rochester, New York. His father, John Mills IV, was a photographer and filmmaker. His mother, Elisabeth (Parker) Mills, was a social worker and political activist. Both were liberals and die-hard New Yorkers.

His second half of high school was spent at Phillips Exeter Academy, where he was the editor of the school newspaper. Michael had deep family ties to the University of Chicago, where buildings were named after his relatives. In a move that shocked his parents, he chose 每日大赛入口 instead. “I had never been west of Chicago,” said Michael. “Reed felt to me like a place that was intellectually open. And so I went off to Reed.”

His junior year, Michael took a leave of absence for an internship at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., which led to an opportunity to join the presidential campaign of anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy; Michael was invited to manage the campaign in Oregon. In 1968, he accompanied McCarthy to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where 10,000 demonstrators were met with now infamous police brutality.

“I encountered something I’d never seen,” Michael said, “which was a street battle in the United States, in the middle of the 20th century. These guys in big Chicago leather police jackets and a couple of guys on horses just knocking kids down—for the hell of
it, really.”

Michael returned to Reed after the internship. As a student, he took a part-time job at a Portland television station, where he was given his own weekly TV show, City on My Mind, in which he interviewed local political figures. There was potential for a promising career in broadcast journalism, but Michael chose to attend law school at the University of Chicago after graduating from Reed with a bachelor’s in political science. 

Three months into his law studies, Michael was drafted. But through cleverly positioning his skills, he avoided overseas duty, working on administrative projects for the Pentagon and then becoming a chef for a two-star general. At the end of Michael’s tour of cooking duty, the general presented him with a general-purpose medal. When Michael asked him what it was for, he told him, “All of it, all of your good service deserves a reward. But it was your whole wheat bread that really swung it.’”

Michael returned to Chicago to finish law school, after which he returned to Portland for a clerkship with federal district judge J.M. Burns, then moved to Manhattan for a position with the prestigious law firm Davis Polk. He practiced there for eight years, then left for a partnership in the New York office of Mayer Brown, where he was put in charge of a new technology committee. This shift away from litigation led to Michael’s bold decision to leave a lucrative law firm partnership for an administrative position in technology. He later rejoined Davis Polk as the director of professional services and systems, a job he held for 20 years. Liam Brown described Michael as “an accomplished, straight-out-of-central casting traditional lawyer who made a leap in the dark.”

Michael pioneered many advances that later became commonplace among top law firms. In 2000, he created what may have been the earliest and most ambitious expert system used within a law firm. He collaborated with Fred Parnon, then the CEO of the software company Jnana, and Laureen Bedell, who was then a partner at Davis Polk. Bedell described it as “a humongous Global Credit expert system Michael developed that our banking clients [including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs] used for decades to test credit risk in over 60 jurisdictions worldwide.” The system incorporated 11,000 rules, 80 products, and 25 industry agreements. It delivered nuanced legal judgments on a seven-point scale.

In 2010 Michael and his longtime collaborator John Lord decided to launch a new software company, Neota Logic, to help law firms “productize expertise” with expert systems like the one Michael had built at Davis Polk. Since then, under Michael’s guidance, Neota has grown to become tremendously sophisticated. Pro bono organizations acquire the software to enhance their “access to justice” initiatives. Leading universities around the world teach Neota, enabling students to build legal solutions of their own without computer science skills. Michael continued to work with the Neota team to improve the software until his death.

While Michael blazed his own trail, he was a kind and generous mentor to others who sought to transition out of their legal practices and into technology and knowledge management roles. Simpson Thacher’s Oz Benamram said of Michael: “His generosity, combined with his superior brain, made him a pillar of the legal tech community.”

Along the way, Michael quietly but effectively lent his time, expertise, and money to the causes he found important. He cofounded the Central Park Conservancy; served as fellow, board member, and president of the College of Law Practice Management; and funded the college’s annual innovation awards. He acted as founding director, vice chair, and generous financial contributor to Pro Bono Net, a nonprofit corporation created to improve the coordination and delivery of pro bono legal services through technology.

Michael loved living near the ocean. He bought a 1926 sailboat as a restoration project; it now rests in the Mystic Seaport Museum. But in 2018, Michael left Manhattan to join Karen MacNeil and her daughter Emma in landlocked St. Helena, California. “For love and only love, Michael was willing to abandon the sea,” said Michael’s close friend, John Alber.

Michael is survived by Karen and by his two brothers, John and Peter.

Appeared in Reed magazine: Summer 2024