The Brief:
MinterEllison has appointed Pooyan Asgari as its Chief AI Officer, a newly created role.
Asgari joins from Domain Group, marking a rare hire from outside the legal industry as firms race to build out AI leadership.
MinterEllison has tapped Pooyan Asgari, the longtime Chief Data Officer of property listing giant Domain Group, to lead its AI strategy. Asgari will take up a newly created Chief AI Officer role.
The move
It’s a departure from the status quo. Most firms chasing “chief AI officer” hires have looked inward, tapping tech-gifted lawyers or business specialists who’ve spent years in the legal space. Asgari has no legal background.
At Domain, Asgari built the platform into one of Australia’s most AI-mature real estate organisations over eight years. He architected an enterprise-wide AI strategy, building a proprietary predictive AI engine and large-scale data platforms serving millions of users, and delivering multiple seven-figure revenue streams from AI.
Asgari starts on 22 July, working alongside Managing Partner, AI Simon Ball and Chief Digital Officer Gary Adler to deliver the firm’s AI strategy.
What they said
CEO and Managing Partner Virginia Briggs said the hire would accelerate the firm’s AI direction.
This is a very exciting appointment for the firm. Pooyan has both deep experience in advising on enterprise AI and then building and commercialising it at scale across large organisations. That rare skillset will further accelerate our leading-edge AI strategy and deeply embed AI into how we deliver value to our clients.
Asgari says he’s drawn to the challenge: “The legal profession is one of the most fascinating places to be working on AI right now; the stakes are high, the problems are genuinely hard, and the opportunity to create real value is enormous.”
He’s already got a framework for how AI should sit alongside lawyers. “The best terminology I can put around the relationship of successful lawyers and AI is an exoskeleton relationshi,” he said. “AI is going to act as this rigid strong skeleton that wraps around the proprietary knowledge and capabilities that sit with our brilliant lawyers.”
And on whether AI will take lawyers’ jobs, Asgari is unequivocal: “Absolutely not.” That confidence is at odds with Minters’ own admission that AI helped drive a near-third cut to its 2025-26 graduate intake.
The hire builds on MinterEllison’s existing AI push, including its co-development partnership with Legora, proprietary tools like Cortex and its recently launched AI Accelerator program.
Source: MinterEllison, AFR