Richard Careaga’s Metadata

I am a senior lawyer who is also an accomplished data science researcher with real world infrastucture experience.¹

The Legal Engineering Researcher

How can AI tools assist in early discovery assessment and the preparation of privilege logs? How to validate AI assisted court filings for accurate quotations? How to use AI to develop a comprehensive case brief? These are some of my current research interests in time away from work as an AI trainer legal subject matter expert.

The Senior Lawyer

Law Review, Coif, Big Law, ALJ, AGC

I graduated from U.C. Davis King Hall School of Law in 1989 and began work as a 42-year old first year associate at Orrick in San Francisco as a deal lawyer. ‘34 Act reporting, secured lending, project finance, loan syndication and intercreditor agreements, letters of credit and mortgage backed securities. Lots of securitizations. Even a municipal bond securitization.

Next I worked as an Administrative Law Judge for the California Public Utilities Commission where I handled the rate stranded cost rate reduction bond issuances for the electric utilities, interconnection agreements between the incumbent regional telephone carrier, AT&T, and new entrants to the fading landline business, a major long-distance transmission line and a variety of routine matters.

From there I went in house at the mortgage banking arm of PNC Bank and when Washington Mutual Bank acquired that business there. Beginning as Second Vice President and Counsel in 1998, I rose to Senior Vice President and Associate General Counsel in 2007. I was its lead counsel for secondary mortgage markets including its securitization program, where I directed registration statements for $100,000,000,000 and $400,000,000,000 offerings. The ended suddenly with WaMu’s seizure by the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission and sale to JPMorgan Chase. Although I had the courtesy title of Associate General Counsel and was still nominally a third-level report to a Fortune 50 CEO, 2009 marked the end of my full-time legal career.

My legal legal career wasn’t all closing dinners and deal toys. In law school I sat second chair in a successful jury trial conviction of a polluter beside Assistant San Joaquin County District Attorney Lisa Brown. I served a term as a judicial extern in the chambers of the Honorable Edward J. Garcia in the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of California. As a summer associate I obtained a domestic restraining order, and I served 18 months as a grand juror in Federal District Court for the Northern District of California.² As an ALJ I wasn’t a real judge, of course, but I did get to sit on the bench in a black robe and rule on objections, plus, of course, preparing findings of fact and conclusions of law. To round out my litigation-adjacent experience I was a named defendant in several class action lawsuits arising from my participation in WaMu’s mortgage backed securities offerings.

The Foundation

Pre-law, I was a planning director and project manager. While I no longer do site plans or manage building designs, the systems lessons abide. Some war stories, including The Great Mississippi Flood of 1973 and the lesson that the solution to every problem begins with understanding the social dynamic in which it presents, how tattooing butterflies saved the developer millions in leaking foundations, and the $100,000 placemat proof that not billable hours are created equal.

Toolkit