Breaking Patterns in the Age of AI: How Legal Can Take Fate Into Its Own Hands

Author: LDI Team

April 29, 2025

In 1903, The New York Times wrote that human flight was an impossible feat that would take “a million to 10 million” years to achieve. Sixty-nine days after the article was published, two bicycle mechanics, who had been quietly working on a new machine codenamed Flyer 1 inside their shop in Ohio, successfully flew the world’s first flying machine.

The story of the Wright brothers served as a fitting prologue to a recent panel discussion. Titled Breaking Patterns: Reimagining Legal in the Year of AI Agents, the session featured Rob Beard, Chief Legal and Global Affairs Officer at Coherent; Farrah Pepper, Chief Legal Innovation Counsel and Chief Global Discovery Counsel at Marsh McLennan; and James Sheppard, Associate General Counsel at Southwest Airlines.

Moderated by Omar Haroun, Co-Founder & CEO of Eudia, the panel explored ideas at the heart of the book Pattern Breakers, in which author and venture capitalist Mike Maples looks at technology inflection points through a historical lens, distilling the key attributes necessary to drive innovative transformation.

By examining the legal industry through a similar prism, panelists shared novel and thought-provoking insights, delivered hot takes, and offered candid perspectives on the future of the legal industry and on the opportunities presented by AI to challenge long-held assumptions and break patterns in the day-to-day trenches of legal work.

Here are highlights from the session, which was attended by a packed and highly engaged audience in New York City at Legalweek 2025.

Back to the Future: A Return to the Lawyering of Old

Early in the session, Beard said that the legal industry was on the cusp of having a Back to the Future moment—a reference to the classic film. Beard believes that lawyering in the near future will share similarities with the profession’s storied past. Indeed, instead of crunching through data and racking up billable hours, attorneys will spend more time focusing on strategic work, as AI enables them to find answers more efficiently and frees them from routine and repetitive work.

“Lawyers in the near future will look more and more like the lawyers of old. The lawyers of old were like apprentices to lawyers who were strategic advisors to their clients—they weren’t paid for the documents they produced or the data that they went through. They were compensated for what they knew and their ability to get results.”

Living in the Future: Rethink and Redefine Your Role

A key takeaway from Maples’s book that came up repeatedly during the discussion was the importance of not only thinking ahead but working as if the future were already here: “Living in the future,” Maples called it.

Pepper elaborated on this idea by setting it in the context of Legal Data Intelligence (LDI). “There are a lot of smart and capable people in the legal profession who have their tentacles in a lot of different areas. But what they have in common is this mastery and excitement for people, process, and technology. A lot of them might be calling themselves a legal operations professional or a discovery professional or other type of roles. But what they do is something grander—in reality, they are Legal Data Intelligence professionals."

Pepper mentioned that as the LDI model gains adoption in the industry, many such legal professionals have already rebranded as LDI professionals, and several new teams are using the term LDI to describe what they do.

“When we think about living in the future, I would encourage you to think about your next title, your next team,” Pepper said.

The Perfect Handover: In-House Lawyers May Leave, but Their Work and Institutional Knowledge Will Always Be Available

Sheppard highlighted how legal departments often struggle with knowledge retention when attorneys depart, leaving years of institutional knowledge buried in document management systems. While the information technically remains within the company, it can become difficult to access and then becomes a “capped oil well” of valuable legal insights.

He proposed a concept that purpose-built AI models trained on a company's internal legal documents (from a departing attorney, for example) could help preserve this knowledge and enable other attorneys to tap into this valuable expertise and historical work product. These AI solutions could function as “synthetic knowledge repositories” that can be queried for specific information or work product that might otherwise be lost when an attorney leaves the company.

According to Sheppard, unlike some law firm, corporate legal departments have a unique advantage in this area because they control their data repositories, giving them the potential to build AI solutions that maintain continuity of knowledge even through personnel changes.

Legal Ops Will Have Its Task Cut Out: Revamp the Tech Stack

During the session, Beard deconstructed the legal operations role as an artifact of the evolution of the legal industry. “At the time, there was this idea that if we brought in people who understood operations, they would help us go and find a people stack—this was before the era of legal technology—to do some of the things that lawyers did but inexpensively.” This people stack, as it were, comprised alternative legal service providers and law firms with alternative fee arrangements.

With the emergence of legal technology, the legal operations leader was entrusted with the integration and deployment of software solutions, i.e., the technology stack. "These are things like contract lifecycle management solutions, which many of us have deployed to the tune of millions of dollars in our companies,” Beard offered as an example.

The upcoming phase of legal operations, according to Beard, will inevitably need to fundamentally change the byzantine stack of specialized software solutions that are in use today.

“Because AI has become capable of doing so much, the next wave of legal ops professionals will help me destroy the tech stack. I’m looking for legal ops professionals who will put AI and AI agents to good use. In this next wave, we will be taking this technology stack that we have painstakingly created and trained people to use, and we will make it less complicated with a more AI-focused and agentic approach.”

Have you ever broken a long-standing pattern in how legal work gets done? Inspired by Breaking Patterns by Mike Maples, we’re collecting stories from legal professionals who have challenged the status quo—whether by rethinking a workflow, adopting a bold new approach, or simply asking, “Why are we doing it this way?”

If you’ve taken a different path and it made a difference, we’d love to hear from you. Please share your story by writing to us at info@legaldataintelligence.com.

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