09 Sep 2026
Charles Zerner Joins Akerman as Director of AI Development
"Akerman has hired Charles Zerner as Director of AI Development to build in‑house AI applications for legal practice, focusing on bespoke AI solutions and legal AI development."
Zerner is a complex commercial litigator with more than 13 years of defense‑side litigation experience and more than 25 years working with artificial intelligence. He joins Akerman to build custom AI applications when commercial products cannot meet the firm’s needs, and will work directly with attorneys and practice groups to assess commercial offerings and develop bespoke applications running within Akerman’s private cloud and data centers.
He joins Akerman from Munck Wilson Mandala LLP in Dallas, where he designed and built production‑scale AI systems for legal practice, including a document review platform built on open‑source models that automated the review of more than 100 million documents in a major intellectual property dispute and yielded multimillion‑dollar client savings. He also served as chief legal architect and primary drafter in Vacker et al. v. ElevenLabs, the first U.S. generative‑AI copyright case to reach a settlement.
Zerner co‑founded a neural‑network startup in 2000, has deployed machine learning in legal practice since 2012, and has taught continuing legal education programs on AI in legal practice since 2017, including ethics programming for the Texas Center for Legal Ethics. He earned his J.D., summa cum laude, from Tulane University Law School and his B.A. with honors from Harvard University.
His appointment completes an intentionally structured AI leadership team at Akerman. Zerner joins Michael Adler, Director of AI Governance & Data Protection, and Tricia Thomas, Director of AI and Research Services, in a three‑part structure separating evaluation of existing tools, development of new solutions, and governance of deployed technology.