Charles Zerner is Akerman's Director of AI Development, responsible for building custom AI applications when commercial products cannot meet the needs of the firm's lawyers and clients. A member of the firm's Information Technology team, Charles works directly with attorneys and practice groups to understand their workflows, determine whether commercial AI platforms can address a given need, and develop bespoke applications -- running within Akerman's private cloud and data centers -- when they cannot.
Charles brings a rare combination of experience to the role. A complex commercial litigator with more than 13 years of high-stakes, defense-side experience and more than 25 years working with artificial intelligence, he understands legal problems from the lawyer's perspective, translates them into technology problems, and personally builds the solutions.
Before joining Akerman, Charles was a principal attorney at a Dallas-based law firm, where he designed and built production-scale AI systems for legal practice. These included a document review platform, built on open-source models running entirely within the firm's control, that automated the review of more than 100 million documents in a major intellectual property dispute — saving the client millions and allowing an otherwise non-viable case to proceed. He also developed agentic AI pipelines for expert report analysis, citation verification, privilege review, and patent prosecution, and built attorney-facing applications used by active case teams.
Charles 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, and the first to ground alleged DMCA violations in the technical realities of AI model training. His litigation practice spanned trade secrets, patent, copyright, antitrust, and unfair competition disputes for clients in the electric vehicle, aviation, pharmaceutical, and software industries.
Charles co-founded a neural-network startup in 2000 and has deployed machine learning in legal practice since 2012. He has taught continuing legal education programs on AI in legal practice since 2017, including ethics programming for the Texas Center for Legal Ethics.