The Legal Data Intelligence Podcast with David Cowen (Episode 2)

In the second episode of David Cowen’s podcast, Careers and The Business of Law: The Legal Data Intelligence Series, he sits down with Scott Milner, a partner and the global head of the eData Practice Group at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP.

During this series, Cowen digs into Legal Data Intelligence from the perspective of the founding members. What is it? What’s the goal? Whom does it serve? What will it entail? Milner provides some helpful insights into how the legal profession has gotten to this point, what the Legal Data Intelligence project hopes to deliver to practitioners, and how legal professionals can get involved in the development of the project.

Listen to the podcast and read a partial transcript below.

David Cowen: You know, Scott, we've known each other for a generation. A generation is 20 years. I was a little older than you when we skinned our knees on the playground of ediscovery back in the day. What was it like when you first got into the space?

Scott Milner: Actually, it's pretty funny, because I think there was no ediscovery, right? I remember one of the first conferences was 20 people in a room in Sedona. I started back in the paper days. We've had to build technology and build processes around it. Obviously, the careers in our space have continually shifted. I've had the luxury of being kind of part of that from day one. And it's super exciting, although when you remind me we've been doing this for over two decades—I like to pretend I started when I was six years old. Can't be that old.

What's the mission of the Legal Data Intelligence project? What is it?

To me, Legal Data Intelligence is the next step to the EDRM. The EDRM has been a great poster child for us in thinking about the interplay between people, process, and technology. When we were thinking about LDI, we thought: why was it so powerful to professionals in our space? We've recognized the value of data and the importance of data for years, but we were looking at it from a new discovery perspective. The professionals in our space are way bigger than ediscovery, and we were realizing many of us were using data and discovery to solve other client or legal challenges: cybersecurity, DSARs, FCPA, investigations, contract analytics.

They all had a lot of the same components that we were using for traditional ediscovery. But again, just like I have throughout my entire career, we had to pivot. I've had to adjust how I address challenges in my legal professional career and my team's professional career at the firm. This was the logical next step to formulate a similar level of documentation, to support those professionals who may want to leverage people, process, and technology to tackle new challenges—because they learned that ediscovery skills could help solve these other challenges.

Can you give us an example of how your ediscovery talents enable you to solve other challenges that your clients are having?

Absolutely. I think of the cybersecurity space. [When an incident occurs] You have to process the data. You need to analyze the data. The end result may look different; it may not be a production to the other side. But it's a data profile of people who may need to be notified if an incident rises to the level of a breach. So a lot of the workflows that we're implementing for ediscovery, we realized, if we tweak them in certain ways, would actually successfully transition to the cyber space.

For example, PII identification: we've been using those tools in ediscovery for years. But how do we make them better so that we can find this information fast? We have mounds and mounds of documents; no one likes a cyber incident. You get that nerve-racking feeling. You need to get information to the client quite quickly, and once you discover a breach, there's only so much time until you have to provide notice—which means we had to expedite the time from data mining to data extraction quite quickly. So we saw the need and ability to pivot many of the tools and processes that we already had and tweak them. And now we've got a whole new career path for people that were in ediscovery to focus on cybersecurity, and that's exciting.

As this project begins to become more public, how do people get involved? Who should get involved?

Anybody dealing with data challenges who really wants to invest time. We're looking for strong allies who can contribute right now; we've got a number of tracks that we're building out with documentation to support those who want to reach out to the Legal Data Intelligence project and see those processes in place. People who want to get involved, want to help advance this, please reach out to me. I'm happy to put you in touch with the right people to get invited to the meetings.

And I'm excited. I've already proactively started to reach out—with approval, of course—to some of my counterparts who I know are tackling this and would benefit from it. They're also looking to pivot their careers, right? They don't want to be in this spot forever, and they know they can put some additional insights into the data. That's only going to make them more valuable to their organization in their professional development.

If you would like to become involved with the Legal Data Intelligence project, please write to us at info@legaldataintelligence.org