Roy Wang, general counsel of Eightfold Inc. (Courtesy photo)

Artificial intelligence-based talent recruiting platform Eightfold Inc., a tech firm founded by a pair of former engineers for Google LLC and Facebook Inc., has hired its first general counsel, who also happens to be an AI expert.  

Silicon Valley-based Eightfold has turned to Roy Wang, an ex-Big Law partner well versed in machine learning, to lead the firm’s legal department. The startup has raised $55 million in funding since it was founded in 2016 and recently opened an office in India. 

“In our search for the right general counsel, we wanted to find someone who is not only a legal expert, but who also understands the changing world where AI is at the center of everything, and that is exactly who we found in Dr. Roy Wang,” Eightfold’s CEO and co-founder, Ashutosh Garg, said in an announcement on Thursday. 

Garg spent four years as a staff research scientist for Google after a stint with IBM Corp. His fellow co-founder, Varun Kacholia, who also serves as Eightfold’s chief technology officer, previously oversaw Facebook’s News Feed team and YouTube’s Search and Recommendations team at Google. 

Wang has a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and has published more than a dozen peer-reviewed journal and conference papers on AI.

Garg described Wang as being “probably the only lawyer in the world who brings deep AI understanding to the legal world because he has actually worked at building machine learning systems. There is no substitute for that kind of experiential learning.”

Wang, also a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, said in an interview on Friday that Eightfold is “expanding quite aggressively, domestically and internationally.”

He added about the General Data Protection Regulation and California Consumer Privacy Act: “GDPR is a big topic. CCPA is coming down the line. How we make sure to use AI smartly, one of the things we do is we don’t abandon human efforts. We have to be careful and judicious about how we marry machine and human ability. You can never build a perfect system with only one.”  

Wang began his career in 2004 as an attorney at Kirkland & Ellis in San Francisco. He joined Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr in 2009 but returned to Kirkland two years later as a partner at the firm’s Palo Alto office, where he represented Fortune 100 companies in the tech industry. 

He most recently served as assistant vice president and associate general counsel for Marvell Technology Group Ltd. During his more than five years at the semiconductor firm’s legal department, Wang was involved in more than 10 M&A deals, including Marvell’s $6.6 billion merger with Cavium Inc. last year, according to his LinkedIn profile. 

In 2016, Wang helped Marvell reduce a historic patent verdict for Carnegie Mellon University from a $1.5 billion award to a $750 million settlement, after an appellate court shaved the award down to $330 million but also ordered a new trial. The university had accused Marvell of copying hard drive noise-reduction technology that the school’s researchers developed. 

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