Grant Vergottini

Grant Vergottini builds the software and standards behind how laws are drafted, amended and published, and writes and speaks about where that work is heading.

Born in South Africa and trained as an electrical engineer, he began his career at Boeing in electronic design automation and systems engineering, working on concurrent fault simulation and design synthesis. He went on to product management at Mentor Graphics and an XML database company owned by Xerox. When he encountered legislative systems around 2000, they looked to him like electronic design two decades earlier: still copying paper processes rather than automating them.

In January 2002 he co-founded Xcential. Its first project was the XML-based drafting, amending and publishing system for the California Legislature, in continuous use since the 2005–2006 session. Since then his work has included converting the United States Code to XML for the Office of the Law Revision Counsel, building web-based drafting tools, and LegisPro, Xcential’s drafting and amending product used by legislatures in the United States and abroad.

He is a long-time member of the OASIS LegalDocML Technical Committee and a co-editor of Akoma Ntoso, the OASIS standard for legislative and legal documents, from Version 1.0 in 2018 through Version 2.0, approved in October 2026. He is also the author of The Pocket Guide to Akoma Ntoso. He holds U.S. patents on bill synthesis, which generates amending bills from law marked up in context, and on change sets for legislative change management. He was named to the Fastcase 50 in 2013.

Today his writing and speaking focus on artificial intelligence in lawmaking: how governments can publish law that AI can use responsibly, how drafters stay in charge, and why structured data matters more than ever. He is a regular speaker at Bússola Tech‘s LegisTech events in Washington, Brasília, Dublin and elsewhere, and has taken part every year since 2010 in the LEX Summer School, held at the University of Bologna’s Ravenna campus in Italy (online in 2020 and 2021).

He is working on a third guide, The Pocket Guide to LegisTech.