Approaching Legal Challenges “Through a Data Lens”: An Interview with LDI Architect Lourdes Fuentes
Author: LDI Team
On his blog eDiscovery Today, Doug Austin published an interview with LDI Architect Lourdes Fuentes, who’s the Founder & CEO of Karta Legal.
Fuentes, who codeveloped workflows for two new LDI use cases — Strategic Response Readiness and Outside Counsel Value Management — spoke on themes central to Legal Data Intelligence: seeing data as an asset that can generate strategic insight; taking control of your data; the connection between strong data governance and the ethical use of AI; and the growing opportunities for data-oriented legal professionals as the industry undergoes AI-driven transformation.
Below is an excerpt from the piece.
For Fuentes, approaching legal challenges “through a data lens” is a guiding principle. As an LDI Architect, she works with a collaborative network of in-house, law firm, and legal technology vendor professionals to develop practical frameworks for managing legal data.
A central tenant of her approach is the “Garbage In, Garbage Out” principle: without well-governed, reliable data, investments in AI and other tools will fail to deliver value. Fuentes emphasized that effective data control is a prerequisite for any successful technology implementation.
For Fuentes, the LDI initiative represents a shift in mindset. Rather than viewing data as a liability, LDI reframes it as a strategic asset that can be mined to make legal departments a value-generating center rather than a cost drain.
A primary focus of Fuentes’ work and LDI’s mission is solving the most significant data challenges faced by corporations and law firms, including:
- Data Governance: Establishing clear policies for managing data.
- Defensible Deletion: Creating ethical, defensible processes for deleting data that is no longer needed.
- Data Quality: Ensuring the reliability of data, which is especially critical for training and utilizing generative AI.
(For readers who want to understand where legal innovation is actually heading, this interview offers a clear signal. Fuentes shows how LDI is giving teams a shared vocabulary, a process backbone and a defensible path for AI deployment. You can read the rest of the article here.)