Companies building with or deploying artificial intelligence are moving faster than their legal structures can keep pace. Oak & Hill, P.C.'s AI Specialty Practice Area helps businesses address data rights, intellectual property, contracts, governance, and regulatory exposure — and issues the ARIA Certification, a formal credential that documents where a company stands.
Artificial intelligence creates new opportunities — and new legal questions. We handle the practical ones: what you may use, what you own, who bears the risk, and what you can show when someone asks.
Review of training, fine-tuning, and inference data sources — what rights you hold, what you promised, and what your platform agreements actually permit.
Vendor, API, platform, and customer agreements drafted or negotiated with AI-specific liability, indemnity, and output provisions.
Ownership and assignment structures for AI-assisted work product, including employee and contractor agreements updated for AI use.
Internal AI use policies, approval workflows, documentation practices, and incident response protocols your board can point to.
Analysis of which frameworks apply to your operations — sectoral regulators, state AI laws, privacy regimes, and the EU AI Act.
A structured review across all five layers, producing a formal scored credential for investors, acquirers, and enterprise customers.
ARIA stands for the five sequential layers of legal risk that every AI-integrated company carries. They are not independent checklists — they are interconnected domains where decisions made in one layer create obligations and vulnerabilities in others.
Partial application produces partial protection. The ARIA Review assesses all five layers together, identifies how they interact, and produces a formal scored credential you can present to investors, acquirers, and customers.
Schedule Your ARIA ReviewThe legal rights, restrictions, and obligations governing the data your AI uses. Who owns your training data — and what did you promise when you got it?
How liability is distributed across your AI value chain. When an AI output causes harm, who pays — and does your contract actually answer that question?
Who legally owns what your AI creates. AI-generated outputs may not be copyrightable — and most commercial agreements haven't caught up to that reality.
Whether your organization can demonstrate responsible AI use. In a dispute, the first question isn't what the AI did — it's what your company did to prevent harm.
Which legal frameworks govern your AI operations today and in the next 24 months. The regulatory landscape is not empty — and the absence of one federal law doesn't mean risk is absent.
| Risk Area | What the Exposure Looks Like | Priority |
|---|---|---|
| Data Rights & Provenance | Using training or fine-tuning data without confirmed rights; platform agreements that transfer data to vendors without review | Critical |
| Vendor Liability Allocation | No negotiated AI-specific provisions in SaaS, API, or platform contracts; vendor terms disclaim all liability for outputs | Critical |
| Output IP Ownership | AI-generated content delivered to customers with undefined ownership; no work-for-hire or assignment provisions in place | High |
| Internal AI Governance | No formal AI use policy; employees using AI tools without documented oversight; no incident response protocol | High |
| Regulatory Exposure | No analysis of CCPA/GDPR implications for AI data pipelines; EU AI Act applicability not evaluated; sector-specific rules ignored | Medium |
| Employment & IP Assignment | Offer letters and IP agreements predate AI; contractor work product involving AI not covered by assignment clauses | Medium |
Until now, there has been no standardized way for a company to demonstrate formally and credibly that its AI legal posture has been professionally evaluated. The ARIA Certification was built to fill that gap.
Think of it as what SOC 2 did for data security, or what a 409A valuation does for equity pricing — a formal, scored, attorney-issued answer to the question every investor and acquirer is now asking.
| Standard | What It Answers | Who Relies on It |
|---|---|---|
| SOC 2 | Is this company's data handling secure and audited? | Enterprise customers, investors, insurers |
| 409A Valuation | What is the fair market value of common stock? | IRS, boards, employees, investors |
| ARIA Certification | Is this company's AI legal infrastructure formally structured? | Investors, acquirers, customers, insurers, regulators |
The cost of addressing AI legal exposure in advance is fixed and finite. The cost of addressing it reactively — in a deal, a dispute, or a regulatory inquiry — is not.
Schedule Your ARIA Review — $5,000The ARIA Playbook is a plain-English diagnostic tool for founders, operators, and senior leaders. It walks through all five risk layers, explains how exposure accumulates in practice, and includes self-assessment checklists for each domain.
It won't tell you everything is fine. It will tell you exactly where to look.
Download the Playbook — FreeA twelve-part written series covering every layer of AI legal risk — written for founders, operators, and investors rather than for lawyers. Article 1 is live now.
The ARIA Certification is a fixed-fee engagement that delivers a comprehensive, cross-layer analysis of your company's AI legal exposure — with a formal score, a reliance-grade certification letter, and a prioritized remediation roadmap.