What We Do

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Legal Risk Management AI provides software tools, advice, and resources that help executives, business managers, in-house counsel, and their lawyers prevent and resolve legal disputes and liability. 
Managing legal risk means (1) identifying the decisions and actions that could give rise to a legal claim, (2) collecting and analyzing data on legal claims and their resolution, and (3) resolving legal disputes wisely, fairly, and cost-effectively.

The Legal Risk Management System helps organizations integrate legal risk intelligence, claims and dispute prevention, and strategic dispute resolution into an organization’s strategy, governance, and operations. The methods, tools, and techniques included in this system are designed to enhance the three foundational dimensions of judgment: fact finding, sense making, and prediction throughout the organization with the goal of reducing legal risk and increasing profitability. 

Legal risk is the possibility that a decision, policy, action, practice, procedure, agreement, design, product, service, or accident could put some or all of the assets of the organization under the control of a court or administrative officer by giving rise to a legal claim, dispute, or problem involving people within the organization, the organization and outside individuals or entities, or government agencies. 

The Legal Risk Management System was developed over decades of research and practice and incorporates the research of leading thinkers and authors such as Randall Kiser (Beyond Right and Wrong), Douglas Hubbard (How to Measure Anything), Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow), Charles Perrow (Normal Accidents), and others. 

We make the Legal Risk Management System available to our clients through books, articles, training, software tools, and consulting services. We encourage you to explore this site for resources that will help you solve your organization's legal risk management challenges. Case assessment is a major focus of our work.
We augment our services with tools and services from Rainbird AI, Lumina Analytica, Bayesia, Jury Lab, Digitory Legal, Cultivate Labs, CaseText, Lex Machina, and Premonition Analytics and others.

We are currently developing a new generation of tools using artificial intelligence resources, Bayesian probability, machine learning, and predictive judgment algorithms that will help clients more accurately assess the financial value and risk of a lawsuit at every stage of its development as well to negotiate a wise and cost-effective resolution when appropriate.

Our Mission

Our purpose is to develop tools, resources, and training that help business executives, managers, in-house counsel, and their lawyers manage legal risk by preventing and resolving legal disputes quickly, wisely, fairly, and cost-effectively.

We seek to reduce the waste and pain caused by avoidable and unnecessary legal problems and high legal fees.

We want to help legal clients better understand how the legal system works in order to more effectively manage legal risk in co-operation with their attorneys.
​Our ultimate goal is to help create a society in which people
​live and work in peace and prosperity with a minimum of legal friction.
Contact us for more information

Who We Are

Charles Barker
A Co-founder and Managing Director of Legal Risk Management AI, Chuck Barker is also the Managing Director of PrimeMover Associates and CMI Concord Group, Inc., international firms dedicated to collaboration and conflict management.  The latter firms are spinoffs of the Harvard Negotiation Project.  For thirty-five years Chuck has advised, taught, coached, and mediated for business, governmental, public interest, academic, and religious organizations world-wide.  He is a Visiting Professor in collaborative negotiation at the London School of Economics and on the Research Faculty of the Uppsala University Faculty of Law.  He also teaches at other law schools and seminaries, publishes, and has created and appears with the late Roger Fisher in instructional videos and DVDs based on Getting to YES and more recently emerging collaborative negotiation theory. 
Currently, Chuck's commercial focus is on health care, financial services, and management consulting. He helps national health care systems, life science companies, governmental agencies, hospitals, patient advocacy groups, HTAs, and payers to build their collaborative negotiation capacity and transform their health care systems in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. 
In the public sector, Chuck has worked with Mercy Corps in post-war Iraq on democratic governance; Norwegian People’s Aid assisting the Syrian Opposition; Artistic Circles on water scarcity issues; the Justice, Peace, and Reconciliation Committee of the Episcopal Church of Sudan on religious and tribal disputes; The Duke Center for International Development training government officials in emerging economies; and the United Nations Development Program on international mining disputes. Chuck also works on integrating formal collaboration and conflict management instruction into business, legal, and seminary graduate studies. His research interests correspond to these projects.
A resident of Chicago, Chuck is married and has seven children.  He received his AB degree from the University of Michigan, a J.D. from New York University School of Law, and postgraduate certification in negotiation through Harvard Negotiation Project at Harvard Law School.  He clerked for the Hon. Charles W. Joiner in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and the Attorneys General of Minnesota and Massachusetts, and practiced trial law as a partner in the Chicago firm of Jenner & Block.

Gisela Palmer
A Co-founder and Managing Director of Legal Risk Management, Gisela Palmer has decades of experience in accounting and office management. Gisela has been involved in the Legal Risk Management program from its early days as a method for predicting the financial value of lawsuits from all perspectives. She has decades of experience helping clients manage their finances and set up financial management programs.
Before turning to accounting and financial management, Gisela taught math in school.
An avid bridge player and instructor,  Gisela administers the hospital bridge program and has been teaching introductory and duplicate bridge classes for years. In the winter, she takes to the trails on cross-country skis. In the summer, she becomes a landscape architect and vegetable gardener, tending to kale, onions, potatoes, lettuce, eggplant, tomatoes, cabbage, and more.

Mike Palmer
A Co-founder and Managing Director of Legal Risk Management, Mike Palmer has over 35 years of litigation experience, first at Jenner & Block and then as head of his own practice in Vermont. Mike has a Ph.D. in social ethics and has written several books and articles on litigation strategy and negotiated dispute resolution. His courtroom experience includes anti-trust, trademark, civil rights, death penalty, personal injury, legal malpractice, and bankruptcy cases.

Mike is also the founder of Win Before Trial, a consulting firm that assists clients with Early Case Assessment and Dispute Resolution Strategy. He is the author of Win Before Trial: What Lawyers and their Clients Must Know to Get the Best Outcomes Possible as well as numerous articles and workshops on the subject. 

A graduate of the Freie Universitaet Berlin and Georgetown University Law Center, Mike also has post-graduate certification in negotiation as well as mediation from Harvard Law School.

Mike has taught negotiation, dispute resolution, and ethics courses at Middlebury College and the University of Vermont, has spoken frequently on Dispute Resolution at ABA and State Bar conferences, and has worked as a Dispute Resolution expert on international Rule of Law projects in emerging market countries.

An energetic speaker, Mike has received accolades from discerning audiences for his presentations. He subscribes to Marshall McLuhan’s view: “Anyone who tries to distinguish education from entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.”