The Legal Data Intelligence Podcast with David Cowen (Episode 1)

In his podcast, “Careers and The Business of Law: The Legal Data Intelligence Series,” David Cowen meets with some of the most interesting minds in the legal space to share insightful and inspiring career stories. David poses searching questions to founding members of the Legal Data Intelligence (LDI) project on the emergence of LDI as a new paradigm and its impact on both the legal industry and profession.

But what is Legal Data Intelligence? What is its origin story? What does it mean to be a Legal Data Intelligence practitioner?

David unpacks these concepts and more in the first episode with his guest, Ashley Christakis. Ashley is the senior manager of e-discovery and legal operations at CrowdStrike, a global cybersecurity leader, and one of the founding members of the Legal Data Intelligence project.

Listen to the podcast and read a partial transcript below.

David Cowen: The ability to transition—that radical curiosity—is a foundational skill or trait that I see in almost everybody in discovery, legal operations, or information governance. These positions are crashing together. When we talk about Legal Data Intelligence, it's driven, to some extent, by next-gen tech creating new possibilities. You've been part of that for a while. Can you talk a little bit about LDI and what it means to you?

Ashley Christakis: I agree. It's driven by next-gen technology, but that's not really a new concept in the legal landscape. We've long had these kinds of emerging technologies that we have to continuously keep up with. Legal Data Intelligence is the combination of data, defensible processes, and technology with the people associated with those processes—and elevating the folks whose roles really don't fit in all those boxes of InfoGov and e-discovery and ops.

They have the technological skills and curiosity that can take them to the tops of their teams, but they don't have a name for it all. They can't put their finger on it. That's why I raised my hand when this initiative started; it felt like that hit home. Yes, I want to talk about this and get other people's thoughts. And I listened to one of your prior podcasts where you were being interviewed. I agreed with something that you mentioned. I am an introvert by nature, and so when I raise my hand, it's about something I'm passionate about. And that's LDI. That's Legal Data Intelligence for me right now.

This is the beginning of a journey, right? Legal Data Intelligence. How do we define it? Who's leading this?

Yes, I think LDI is a name to put to the next evolution—the next generation of the people associated with this new stage. There's so much data in legal, so the next-gen tech going to be generative AI, it's going to be LLMs, it's going to be all the analytics that still live in e-discovery. It's going to be all of the matter management, all of the e-billing, all of these pieces of legal data can be trickled into a team of people who understand it at its core.

And it's not just about the data itself; it's about where it's coming from. The data sources where all of this data lives. How does the back-end work? How are the front-end users using it? Each of those questions really play into how we’re going to find insights into and apply this data in this new business model.

What is it about professionals like yourself who come from a project management, e-discovery, InfoGov, or legal ops background that’s well-suited to guide this evolution? If you had to name your three superpowers, what makes legal professionals like you uniquely qualified to lead this charge?

One that I feel really passionate about is technology curiosity. That is innate in me. And I think that is a required quality for someone in this type of role—a data intelligence role.

I think another would be relationship building, which kind of goes hand in hand with collaboration: knowing who's who and really getting to understand their side of things, because it's not going to work unless you guys can work together.

Then it’s a combination of—I don't know if “customer service” is the right term, but internally, my customers are those in our legal practice areas. So it’s about serving them with integrity and transparency and honesty to make sure that I'm hitting all of their requirements—like you're saying, project management—as we build a solution.

The scale of data is also something that very few people within corporate legal departments understand: the size, scope, and scale of the data as it pertains to the entire organization. This is the value of, as you say, data intelligence. But what is data intelligence?

I look at it as our enterprise architecture. What are the pipes that keep a corporation going? And how do you draw insights efficiently and intelligently from all this data? e-Discovery has such a handle on this because you really have to know how to do an insightful document review, which starts with going all the way back to the baseline of the technology and asking, “what are the end users using this to do?”

What's the retention policy? What are the core uses of this data? Is the data unique? It’s those types of information, but then it's also: how can I put it on legal hold? How can I suspend that retention period? How can I collect from it? We're in every data source; even if the company has 200 applications, every technologist probably knows where it is.