Melody Drummond Hansen

Drummond Hansen thrives at the intersection of technology and law. As chair of O’Melveny’s automated and connected vehicles industry group, her legal skills have been used on the world’s most cutting-edge technologies including cameras, voice recognition tools and self driving cars.

In addition to advising on intellectual property matters, she also advises companies on litigation risk, regulatory compliance, data security and privacy, regulatory compliance, and state and federal agency investigations. Drummond Hansen said she tries to stay ahead of the curve so she can have an understanding of how future technological advancements are going to affect her clients.

“AI is unavoidable,” Drummond Hansen said. “It is a huge part of the future of technology, so I’m always interested in where technology is headed and how to anticipate the needs that technology companies will have based on that.”

Drummond Hansen counseled comma.ai, an open source code provider that offers automated vehicle capabilities to regular cars, such as General Motors, Toyotas and Hondas.

She said most of her work with comma.ai was advising on making machine learning codes, open source or proprietary. Another part of Drummond Hansen’s role with comma.ai was representing their products before the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration and the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

Apart from that, she’s done work in predictive analytics, using data gathered through artificial intelligence to predict what users will like or need.

“My work has touched on the mechanics of voice recognition and using what you’ve recognized from [a] voice to take an action on behalf of the user,” she said.

Working in a space that’s largely unregulated can be a challenge, but Drummond Hansen said it also allows companies to take the lead and educate regulators on what the new technology can provide.

“It’s especially challenging in a space like this where the technology becomes more and more complex when you have aspects of it like machine learning or just the vast amount of data that can now be collected and processed by an autonomous vehicle,” she said. “It’s a real challenge to master it, to be able to understand it well enough to regulate.”

Despite the challenges, Drummond Hansen sees a massive benefits from artificial intelligence and automated driving capabilities.

“There are going to be some really fascinating social justice questions in AI,” she said. “They’re not only important questions because of the ethics and justice implications of AI, but also for advising clients on the best way to develop and make sure that AI is being developed in a responsible way and that we’ll have socially beneficial outcomes and not unintended negative outcomes, including for diverse and vulnerable communities.”

— Nicole Tyau