Adrian Cartland

About Adrian Cartland

Adrian “the Taxinator” Cartland’s childhood dream was to become a Transformer (like his hero Optimus Prime). Unable to chart a career path from small human child to giant transforming alien robot, and not being good at maths (to the disappointment of the engineers in his family) he decided instead to pursue commercial law.  He achieved good grades at University, despite not doing most of his readings, and overloaded subjects so he could skip a couple of years (not doing most of the work frees up a lot of time).  His second lowest grade was tax law. Despite his unimpressive tax law exam results, Adrian found himself reading the Master Tax Guide for fun during the holidays and decided that if this was his idea of fun then he is too odd to do a more normal area of law so he is probably stuck in tax. Plus he wasn’t going to do the readings in the other areas anyway.

Adrian then worked at a number of tax law roles in top tier firms as well as boutique tax practices for about ten years, meeting his billable targets on at least a few occasions. It was then that he began thinking about the future of law and developed an interest in legal Artificial Intelligence, mostly in an effort to find a robot to do the work he was too lazy to do. Deciding that it was best to pursue this expensive and time consuming hobby (er, business) while not on someone else’s timesheet he founded his own firm Cartland Law. Now unemployable, he has run the firm for nearly a decade.

Because Adrian knows very little about other, more normal, areas of law, Cartland Law specialises in and only accepts instruction in tax, trusts and technology. While the engineers in Adrian’s family have constructed many things beneficial to society, Adrian has instead created a number of complex tax and trust structures. He has also created Ailira, the Artificially Intelligent Legal Information Research Assistant and thereby partly contributed to the doom of humanity by AI.

He is the Chair of The Tax Institutes State Taxes Committee, was Australia’s funniest lawyer in 2007 and holds the Australian record for fastest MMA knockout at 6 seconds. He used some of the material in this bio to meet his wife on Tinder, and has asked for the remainder to be added to his eulogy if he is ever (accidentally) brutally dispatched (by her).