Legal Data Intelligence Turns One:
New Model Workflows, Resources, and Thought Leadership to Empower Legal Professionals
Author: LDI Team
It’s been one year since the Legal Data Intelligence (LDI) initiative and model were launched to redefine the value that legal teams can bring to organizations through a powerful combination of people, defensible processes, and technology. Over the last 12 months, the LDI project has galvanized a large and growing community of legal professionals by giving them a new framework, vocabulary, and voice to address many of the most complex legal data challenges facing the industry today.
During this time, founding members of the Legal Data Intelligence project and LDI Architects—a diverse group of legal, data, and technology experts chosen for their expertise in a wide range of practice areas—have been hard at work.
The Legal Data Intelligence model was built with iteration and evolution in mind. It’s designed to grow and adapt—adding new use cases and updating existing ones to keep pace with changes in the data and legal landscape and remain faithful to the lived experience of legal professionals.
Today, we’re excited to share five new use cases in the Legal Data Intelligence model, enhancements to five existing use cases, and new resources and thought leadership to empower more practitioners to effectively apply the model, excel as LDI professionals, and elevate their careers.
A Comprehensive Framework and Expanded Footprint With Five New Use Cases
At its launch in May 2024, the Legal Data Intelligence model consisted of 12 use cases spread across four categories: Disputes & Investigations, Corporate, Data Protection Compliance, and Business of Law.
Now, five new use cases augment that foundation, deepening the model’s impact and reach:
Mergers, Acquisitions, and Divestitures
Category: Corporate
Mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures are among the most complex and high-impact events a business can undertake. They are legal and financial balancing acts where information asymmetry, time pressure, and regulatory scrutiny converge.
These processes rely on the team’s ability to rapidly surface, interpret, and act on massive volumes of unstructured legal information: contracts, compliance documents, IP rights, change-of-control clauses, indemnities, and more. Any overlooked clause or misplaced document can introduce financial, legal, or reputational risk. Legal teams must conduct due diligence that is not only faster, but deeper and more defensible.
This domain is also rich with repeatable processes, making it ideal for legal data structuring, automation, and applied intelligence.
Simply put, this use case is one of the most demanding, high-value, and data-saturated areas of legal practice, making it a natural and urgent frontier for legal data intelligence professionals to assume the lead.
Like all LDI model use cases, the new Mergers, Acquisitions, and Divestitures use case offers a proposed workflow for completing these types of projects, punctuated with best practices and guidance on how technology can assist to make steps in the process faster, more efficient, or less risky. The Corporate LDI Architect team has also published an accompanying guide that maps data considerations, outlines key stakeholders and their value drivers, and includes tailored talking points. It serves as more than a communication tool; it’s a strategic framework practitioners can use for influence, alignment, and impact.
The workflow empowers legal data professionals to add value to a merger, acquisition, or divestiture by giving them the language and context to connect their work directly to business outcomes. It transforms them from a behind-the-scenes operator into a strategic partner who doesn’t just support the deal but ensures its successful execution.
Data Disposition
Category: Data Protection Compliance
Proper and defensible disposition of data is key to any data protection program or workflow. The retention of personal or confidential information beyond what is necessary leads to regulatory and legal risks.
The LDI model fleshes out the multiple considerations for sound data disposition instead of merely examining disposition as a step in the approach. The workflow also describes the interactions between multiple stakeholders, emphasizing the role of the Legal Data Intelligence professional.
This new use case will empower legal professionals by giving them a flexible paradigm that they can follow. It further demonstrates the importance of working across functions to accomplish everyday goals, and it gives Legal Data Intelligence practitioners both a reminder and green light to foster collaboration.
Cybersecurity Compliance and Governance
Category: Data Protection Compliance
Cybersecurity is a central component of both data protection programs and the practice of Legal Data Intelligence. The threats to an organization's information are real, sophisticated, and ongoing, and therefore the documentation, monitoring, and reporting of a cybersecurity program’s compliance and governance policies and practices are essential to its functionality.
The Cybersecurity Compliance and Governance workflow is unique in that, rather than emphasizing detailed technical requirements, it prioritizes delivering consistent and accurate answers to the questions Legal Data Intelligence practitioners are most likely to face from clients, regulators, and auditors. It is not a blueprint for building a cybersecurity program from the ground up, but rather a digestible road map to provide information and documentation to commonly requested cybersecurity questions.
The LDI approach to cybersecurity provides sufficient detail for legal professionals to leverage existing work product to implement a reasonable compliance and governance program for their organization.
Data Loss Prevention
Category: Data Protection Compliance
Today's business environment runs on information—much of which resides in an electronic format. The importance of preventing data loss—whether the problem stems from cybersecurity breaches or departing employees—cannot be overstated. It’s imperative for organizations to have controls and safeguards that are process oriented as well as technical to protect against the unauthorized access, loss, or misuse of data.
The LDI approach recognizes the interconnected nature of a data loss prevention program – including data governance, security operations, configuration management, and policy – and further highlights the importance of breaking down silos.
Source Code
Category: Data Protection Compliance
Source code protection is becoming increasingly important as companies adopt and/or build their own technology stack. The dynamics of protecting source code are somewhat distinct compared to the rest of an organization's information or data footprint.
This LDI model’s workflow for source code protection is unique because it focuses primarily on data investigation as a practical means for reviewing source code and reporting on findings, outcomes, and discrepancies.
With the addition of this use case, data-oriented legal professionals who have worked on disputes and investigations or discovery tasks will easily be able to transfer their skill sets to establishing processes for source code protection in their own organizations.
Beyond the new LDI model use cases mentioned above, the Disputes & Investigations LDI Architect team has globalized and refined these existing use cases: Litigation and Dispute Resolution, Regulatory Requests, Third-Party Subpoenas, and Internal Investigations. Additionally, the Business of Law LDI Architect team has expanded the Invoice Review use case to Outside Counsel Value Management. This broadened workflow is designed to help LDI practitioners optimize outside counsel relationships by analyzing performance and compliance metrics in addition to spend to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and align legal services with organizational goals.
A Growing Knowledge Library: New Resources and Thought Leadership to Empower LDI Practitioners
Alongside adding new use cases to the LDI model and refining existing use cases, the 2025 cohort of LDI Architects has published a raft of new resources to empower Legal Data Intelligence practitioners to effectively utilize the model and level up in their careers. The list includes:
Mergers, Acquisitions, and Divestitures Toolkit
A comprehensive guide covering operational, legal, financial, and regulatory risks that LDI practitioners need to be aware of in conducting due diligence for a merger, acquisition, or divestiture. The guide concisely breaks down the roles, responsibilities, and capabilities that go into these processes and is a helpful companion piece to the LDI model workflow.
Article: “Building Bridges in the Disputes Space with Legal Data Intelligence”
This article examines in detail how operational and communication silos between ediscovery vendors and lawyers lead to suboptimal outcomes. It posits the Legal Data Intelligence practitioner as an interdisciplinary go-between who can work as a translator between lawyers and ediscovery specialists. By providing the connective tissue between legal strategy and data strategy, the LDI practitioner can play an ineffective role in bridging gaps between specialist teams. This article has been co-authored by LDI Architects Tristan Jenkinson, Matthew Hamilton, and LDI founding member Kelly Friedman.
White Paper: “The Application of Legal Data Intelligence to Governmental Investigations”
In 2024, 70% of organizations were involved in at least one regulatory proceeding. As regulatory scrutiny intensifies, organizations must respond swiftly to mitigate risks and gain strategic advantages. In this white paper, LDI Architects Kevin M. Clark, Melina Efstathiou, Chuck Kellner, and Daniel Miller, along with LDI founding member Kelly Friedman, explore the use of the Legal Data Intelligence model when conducting investigations, drawing on their collective experience in American and British regulatory environments.
It Started with a Model. Now It’s a Global Community with a Place in the Org Chart
From the start, the Legal Data Intelligence initiative has resonated with legal professionals. We’ve heard from numerous industry leaders—including GCs and CLOs—on how corporate legal departments, law firms, and legal service providers can benefit from having Legal Data Intelligence practitioners on their teams. Indeed, LDI has officially entered the legal lexicon and carved a unique place in the legal firmament as new roles and career opportunities are beginning to emerge around it. Last year, Kelly Friedman became the world’s first Chief Legal Data Intelligence Officer at Heuristica, and Walgreens recently hired an LDI Analyst—to name just a few.
True to its grassroot origins, LDI has engendered a community of passionate volunteer experts. Thirty-three LDI Architects from top law firms, corporate legal teams, and legal service and technology providers are taking time out of their day jobs to formally participate in pushing the LDI movement forward—refining and improving the LDI model and evangelizing the principles. The new and updated use cases, thought leadership, and resources described above are just the beginning, and the Architects are already hard at work on more content to be rolled out in the coming months. Follow the Legal Data Intelligence initiative on LinkedIn to see what’s new and engage with the LDI community.
One year on, Legal Data Intelligence is no longer an emerging idea—it’s a holistic approach that is being actively tested, refined, and applied to address complex data challenges in a growing number of use cases across a wide range of practice areas.
By equipping legal professionals with a shared vocabulary, a framework, and best practices, we aim to modernize the legal function—transforming it from a perceived cost center into a strategic enabler of value—by placing data at the heart of legal decision-making. We invite your thoughts and ideas at info@legaldataintelligence.org. Cheers to another year!