Ansel Halliburton is a lawyer at ComputerLaw Group, a boutique law firm in Palo Alto specializing in intellectual property litigation and entrepreneurship.

Ansel started programming at age ten, and began his career as a startup programmer during college. Shortly before the dot-com crash, he presented his work on the floor of the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas, and later worked with a global team on an award-winning web application.

Eventually, Ansel realized that he liked to write prose more than code, and began to transition into the legal field. After working as a paralegal in intellectual property litigation, Ansel became the second employee of the Stanford IP Litigation Clearinghouse (since spun out as Lex Machina), where he found himself building software again. There, he wrote specialized web crawlers and a rules engine that powered the world’s most comprehensive database of patent litigation. He also met with lawyers and judges, managed analysts, and traveled to Wisconsin in the middle of the winter to obtain key court records that were not available electronically.

Now a lawyer, Ansel’s practice at ComputerLaw Group focuses on complex intellectual property litigation on behalf of entrepreneurs, startups, and established companies. Ansel also devotes part of his time to corporate work, helping start startups.

Ansel still codes, mainly in Python. Ansel was on the founding team of the Berkeley Political Review, and, during law school, he presented an academic paper on maritime piracy and international law at a graduate symposium at UC Davis.