LDI in the News: Founding Member Adam Rouse Featured on Modern Counsel

Editor’s Note: Modern Counsel recently published an in-depth interview with LDI founding member Adam Rouse. In the feature story, Rouse expounds on the mission at the heart of the Legal Data Intelligence model, and the foundational role that it has played in articulating the transferability of LDI skills between different disciplines and functions. We are publishing an excerpt of the original article below.

Above all things, Adam Rouse is curious. It’s a word that gets used indiscriminately these days, but Rouse is the kind of person you think about when you’re trying to think of the right embodiment of the expression. The current senior counsel and director of eDiscovery operations at Walgreens spent nearly fifteen years as a technology architect and engineer prior to going to law school.

Since that shift, he’s built out master-level experience in eDiscovery, reshaped the function at Fortune 500 companies, become a founding member of the pioneer Legal Data Intelligence (an initiative focused on breaking down barriers across compliance, privacy, IT, legal operations, and eDiscovery), and is passing along the sum of his knowledge as an adjunct professor at Loyola Law.

Rouse says the curiosity that has driven him was, at least in part, the byproduct of coming from two generations of teachers on his mother’s side. The attorney jokes about never being able to get away with anything at school, the same one his mother taught at. He was raised to respect and honor the tradition of teaching, the value of education, and the pursuit of knowledge.

“Helping build LDI and, eventually, teaching myself, is just a reflection of people in my career who saw a spark in me and helped me grow that into a fire,” Rouse says. “They helped me expand my network; they helped introduce me to new ideas. Almost anyone I think of in the eDiscovery space has had people like that, and I think it’s a very special part of that industry.”

The attorney’s journey into eDiscovery was just a happenstance. His dual fluency in technology and law led a deputy CISO to enlist him for a project with Walgreens’ legal department. Rouse says his passion and area of focus were basically an accident, but the result has shaped his career.

This is Rouse’s second round at Walgreens, having been recruited by US Foods to build their eDiscovery function from scratch in 2020. The role was created with him in mind. The only problem was that when Rouse successfully took the function in-house, he felt like his work was done. Walgreens wanted him back, but he wanted to approach the job from a different angle.

“I wanted to come and drive change from the legal side of the organization, not the IT side,” Rouse explains. “Given the volume and scope of the projects we were working on, we needed to spin up our eDiscovery on the legal side of things. Thankfully, the team agreed.”

Read the rest of the article over at Modern Counsel.