Legal Data Intelligence: A Harbinger of New Roles in Legal

At CLOC Global Institute 2024, a group of industry experts unveiled Legal Data Intelligence (LDI), a new initiative and approach to solving the complex data problems that often get in the way of legal professionals today.

The Legal Data Intelligence paradigm addresses underlying data challenges across a growing number of use cases. It offers an interactive model, best practices, and a new vocabulary to articulate the holistic approach legal professionals often take in overcoming legal data challenges.

In their CLOC panel discussion, It’s Time: Meet the Legal Data Intelligence Model and Learn How to Turbocharge Your Role, LDI founding members speculated that this initiative could also foreshadow the emergence of new roles, pathways, and career opportunities in both in-house and outside counsel teams.

“Likewise, a senior role such as a Director of Legal Data Intelligence would have the vision to design a holistic strategy for Legal Data Intelligence for the organization; she would have the passion and ability to effectively communicate the value of Legal Data Intelligence to senior stakeholders across the business; she would have the competence and authority to make fundamentally important decisions about strategy, such as buying new technology versus building it; picture someone who can truly combine deep domain expertise with the full trifecta of people, process, and technology.”

Panelists and attendees had a lively discussion on the need for a central and dedicated function tasked with applying the Legal Data Intelligence model.

At the root of these discussions was the realization that every legal challenge includes a legal data challenge that can be successfully overcome with the Legal Data Intelligence model.

“Regardless of what the practice area is, the common goal is finding quick answers to legal data challenges. Litigation, data privacy, compliance, employment, audit—all of these areas have legal data challenges,” explains Ashley Christakis, another founding member and the senior manager of ediscovery and legal operations at CrowdStrike. “Having a Legal Data Intelligence professional pull SUN (sensitive, useful, necessary) data out of the sea of ROT (redundant, obsolete, trivial) data streamlines the whole process.”

How Will Legal Data Intelligence Be Used by Legal Practitioners?

Any model is only as useful as its implementation and adoption, so understanding what Legal Data Intelligence is only comprises half the equation. Success also requires understanding how to use it in practice.

For each use case covered, the Legal Data Intelligence model lists the steps necessary to complete it. These steps are grouped into three categories: Initiate, Investigate, and Implement.

“Implementing—the last step—will look very different depending on the type of work involved,” says Jeremiah Weasenforth, legal analytics director at Edward Jones and a founding member of the project.

To illustrate his point, Weasenforth brought up contract review—one of the use cases covered by the Legal Data Intelligence model:

• Let’s imagine there is a big deal coming in and the contract is on the other side’s paper. Now, let’s say your commercial transactions attorney sees a provision in the contract that’s a showstopper provision. Historically, the attorney would have met with business stakeholders to explain the risk and spent months negotiating the provision with the other party. Where Legal Data Intelligence can enhance that process is that it can help capture key information based on the historic negotiations that have been done with similar contracts. It will help you fetch information such as how many turns it will take for the contract to be resolved based on the type of contract and the type of provision implicated and the likelihood of achieving a positive negotiated outcome with that provision. All of that information equips you to go to your business area and give them a clear picture of the negotiation timeline, the level of effort involved, the legal risk of the provision, and the potential impact to the business value associated with delaying or not closing the deal.

A Catalyst for New Careers

Much like the advent of ediscovery gave rise to ediscovery professionals, the emergence of Legal Data Intelligence could lay the foundation for new, career-defining opportunities.

For example, over the last 10 years, the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), and a raft of global privacy regulations—alongside burgeoning data lakes hiding many bits of personally identifiable information—have left corporations and law firms scrambling to hire privacy attorneys.

Similarly, cost pressures on legal departments in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession spurred the emergence of legal operations, as organizations scrambled to improve efficiencies and outcomes in these functions.

“I distinctly remember talking to a GC who was struggling to hire a privacy lawyer in the wake of GDPR as they were dealing with a lot of Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs). It took months for the GC to find a privacy lawyer, as privacy lawyers had become very high in demand at that time,” says Omar Haroun, LDI founding member as well as the founder of tech companies including Text IQ. “And when they finally get their privacy lawyer, it turned out that person actually had no idea how to respond to a DSAR. But then down the hall, there was someone who had this LDI-style skill set and eventually figured it out.”

Indeed, solving legal data challenges in a strategic and defensible way without hurting the pace of business requires legal professionals to not only have familiarity with the law, but well-earned experience in working with data and its related processes and technology.

In the not-so-distant future, Legal Data Intelligence practitioners could enable general counsel to run their departments like a business—with a predictable cost structure and clear processes in place.

Within law firms, these practitioners could enable lawyers to stay focused on their subject matter expertise without being impeded by legal data challenges.

Finally, within legal service providers, Legal Data Intelligence practitioners could bring new offerings to their clients and enable them to better manage data to improve efficiency, save resources, and mitigate risk.

How to 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 get involved.

The founding members of Legal Data Intelligence have created some sample job descriptions as a blueprint for legal teams as they begin to create new roles and functions around Legal Data Intelligence. For example, you’ll find outlines for roles like Legal Data Analyst and Head of Legal Data Intelligence covered.

You can adapt these materials to guide your own resume development and your ongoing professional development plans.

Additionally, start sharing the model and its use cases with your colleagues to help guide your team’s investments in people, process, and technology.

Reach out to us at info@legaldataintelligence.org to share your feedback or find out how you can get involved.