Why does an engineer make a podcast with a lawyer?
My job is building systems: architectures, integrations, automation, and these days above all AI. I know where they break, because I have watched them break, and more than once I have been the one called in to put them back on their feet.
What I usually do not see is what comes next. When a system gets something wrong, my part ends with the fix: find the defect, repair it, move on. For the company the story goes on, and sooner or later someone has to answer for what happened, to a customer, an employee or an authority. Armando, a lawyer who works in IT law, knows exactly that half of the story: what happens when systems like the ones I build end up in front of a judge.
Put together, our two points of view cover the stretch between the day a technology enters a company and the day someone has to answer for it. The podcast is there to talk about it at that point, before a judge does.
Why a courtroom?
Because that is where these questions end up anyway, so we might as well use the court’s rules from the start. Every episode is a trial, and it opens with the same line: “Benvenuti nel Tribunale dell’Innovazione”, welcome to the Court of Innovation. There is a defendant. There are the charges. There is the hearing between prosecution and defence, where I bring the technical reading, how a system is built and where it breaks, and Armando the legal one, who is liable and how you protect yourself. At the end there is a verdict.
The frame makes us ask the question that is usually missing from a product presentation, who answers for it if something goes wrong, and close with a practical verdict instead of an “it depends”. Our tagline puts it better than I can: we put innovation in the dock, before somebody ends up in it.
What is in the first episode?
The defendant is AI in business, and the question is already in the title: when it gets it wrong, who answers for it? There are three charges.
- AI enters the company without processes and without data.
- It is handed to the supplier who sells what they know, not what is needed.
- The lawyer arrives when the project is already finished.
Along the way we talk about how to choose a technical partner, the minimum team you need and the role of the legal tech engineer. And about the real cost of a project that has to be redone, which is not the fine: it is redoing the work, and losing your investors.
Where can you find it?
The episode runs 37 minutes, it is in Italian and it is available as a video on both YouTube and Spotify. The podcast’s website is innovazionesottoprocesso.it.
If you watch it and have an objection, write to me: a trial where the other side cannot reply would not be a trial.
Write to me