From Cost Center to Strategic Partner: How Legal Data Intelligence Practitioners Can Unlock Business Value
Author: LDI Team
One of the key attributes of a Legal Data Intelligence (LDI) practitioner is the ability to accelerate business while still mitigating legal risk. Indeed, a significant marker of LDI practitioners is that they are equipped with an enterprise-wide view of their client’s business and are therefore in a better position to locate gaps where they can use their skills to add not just legal but also business value.
In a now famous lecture at his alma mater (the University of Chicago Law School), prominent Silicon Valley investor and lawyer David Sacks—one of the key members of the PayPal Mafia—shared what he looks for in a lawyer:
“Great business lawyers help you get things done. By the time you graduate from law school, you’ve basically spent 20 years of your life in school where things revolve around standardized testing. But there’s no standardized test for life. And so, it’s not about proving how smart you are—it’s about trying to facilitate a business outcome."
Legal teams are primarily involved in mitigating risk and are not directly responsible for growing the business. Shaking off the “cost center” tag therefore requires legal professionals to resist siloed thinking, engage more proactively with diverse business units, and find creative solutions to problems that may be slowing down the business.
“Businesspeople with Law Degrees”
In 2022, Jeffrey Salling, a founding member of the Legal Data Intelligence project, joined Moderna as their Chief of Staff and Senior Director of Legal Operations. Formerly the Global Director of eDiscovery at Novartis, Salling now found himself with a much wider remit. “There’s a very important distinction between discovery and Legal Data Intelligence. In discovery, you need to understand data and litigation. With Legal Data Intelligence, you need to have a granular understanding of the client’s business, how it operates as an organization, and the nuances of the larger industry in which it operates. I think of LDI leaders as businesspeople with law degrees.”
Salling offers contract reviews as one example of where legal professionals can play an important role in bringing products to market faster. “In the pharmaceutical space, eliminating delays in contract reviews will help us kick off a clinical trial more quickly. It has ripple effects on subsequent clinical trials and ultimately on how quickly we can get FDA approval. This means we can bring a potentially life-saving drug to market faster.”
Crossing the Chasm: Risk Mitigators to Business Advisors
Over the years, the explosion of unstructured data has made it more difficult and time-consuming to execute legal tasks. Whether they’re searching for relevant information in an ocean of data or redacting sensitive information such as PI and trade secrets commingled with other types of data, legal professionals are spending longer hours getting to the information they need to make a legal judgment.
But on the flipside, with the emergence of generative AI, legal professionals now have the opportunity to interrogate historical data to glean insights that can directly impact the business. Founding member Jeremiah Weasenforth, who is AGC and Legal Analytics Director at Edward Jones, talks about how Legal Data Intelligence practitioners can leverage AI to provide insights on the likelihood of customer complaints and litigation after the launch of a new product or service.
“You can look at the historical data to identify common factors that led to customer complaints and ultimately litigation. You can start to develop machine learning models to predict when and where similar issues could come up in the future. You can share this data intelligence with the business leaders so that they are in a better position to place guardrails that can prevent customer attrition and litigation.”
Getting Creative with Data to Unlock Business Insights
Founding member Scott Milner, who is a Partner and Global Practice Group Leader of the eData Practice Group at Morgan Lewis, believes that being a good LDI practitioner is about always looking for ways to add more value to the client.
“Data is information and information is power. When a client hires my team for ediscovery, I proactively try to provide additional value from the data. For example, informing them of what data should have been purged in accordance with the retention policy may not be in the scope of the ediscovery project, but it is value that is additive.”
Milner brought up another example to illustrate the impact of creating business value for the client. His team built, tested, and deployed a custom AI model to identify contracts where his client was missing out on capturing additional revenue because of price escalation clauses.
“Because of our work, the client has asked us to perform additional custom clause extraction for other business cases. We also expect to be able to repurpose this workflow and solution for other clients for non-legal use cases where the primary objective is to provide business value. This project also magnified the work of our technologists and gave them more visibility within the firm besides giving them more facetime with the client,” said Milner.
Evolve Your Career with Legal Data Intelligence
Whether the Legal Data Intelligence framework appears to align with the work you’re already doing, or appeals to you as a professional path forward, now is the time to act.
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