The Legal Data Intelligence Podcast with David Cowen (Episode 3)

What stories and insights are hidden in businesses’ burgeoning data lakes—and how can today’s legal professionals extract the greatest possible value from them? The Legal Data Intelligence model is designed to answer just that. In episode 3 of his podcast, “Careers and The Business of Law: The Legal Data Intelligence Series,” David Cowen discusses this question and more with Josh Kreamer, chief strategy officer and GC at Fileread.

Cowen and Kreamer also chat about career trajectories, what it’s like at the intersection of technology and the law, how the many disciplines that live there can collaborate on Legal Data Intelligence initiatives, life at Harvard Law School, and more.

Listen to the full episode below, and scroll down to read a partial transcript.

David Cowen: Josh Kreamer is the chief strategy officer and general counsel of Fileread, but formerly was the head of legal services at AstraZeneca. I think you probably remember when a terabyte was a lot of data, Josh.

Josh Kreamer: I do, and I'd like to believe it's still a lot of data. But you know, it's coming closer and closer to average every day.

Tell us a little bit about Legal Data Intelligence. What is it to you? And how did you get involved?

To me it is a framework for understanding what we, as legal data and ediscovery professionals, do—those of us who stand at the intersection of law and technology. And how is it that we do it? And how should we do it?

It's designed to help build a vocabulary within core businesses for what this role is. In my experience, ediscovery professionals are some of the most capable and hardworking people I know but unfortunately, today, it's too easy for us to get pigeonholed into legal roles that are limited, that don't necessarily have the full breadth of the capabilities that we can bring.

I think LDI is designed to start to really address that.

Historically, data seemed to be seen as rather static. Here's the data; there's a lot of it. We've got to get through it. And then we're going to present it. What I'm beginning to hear you and others say is that data has an intelligence to it—or, at least, there's an ability to gather intelligence from the data beyond just who said what to whom. There's more to the story, if you will. How do you interpret that?

The evolution that I've seen has been from documents to answers and stories. It's answers and stories that we can make decisions based on, and that we can design strategies around.

It used to be, you know, literally lawyers in warehouses, their clients’ warehouses, going through boxes of paper documents—followed by, pretty much, just large email reviews. And it really was sort of the document they cared about. That was the thing.

We've now got so many different forms of communication, so many different ways to document and organize information, that it's becoming less about that unit for review and more about the information you can glean—and even shifting from simply that information you can glean to being able to actually answer strategic questions, to decide the best course of action based on it all.

That is really powerful, to break it down from documents to stories and insights. I've spoken to other people who say this is way beyond ediscovery. There's this interdependence, if you will, of ediscovery, information governance, legal operations, risk, governance, compliance, cybersecurity. Who's in charge? Are you seeing a new role evolve here?

I think companies are going to start to realize that this all converges together in some form of very high-level knowledge management. And I feel like you: people with ediscovery backgrounds and people with Legal Data Intelligence skills are well equipped to become the chief knowledge management officers of the future—to look at all of the data across the estate of a company, be it the most sensitive, useful, and necessary data or the everyday noise that needs to be separated out.

They will be able to figure out things like: What do we need to do with this? How long do we need to keep it? What does it mean for us? What does it mean for us to keep it? What does it mean for us to delete it? How can we delete it? And how do we manage that data and get as much out of it as we can?

And when you say most out of it, I suspect that you're moving toward value.

Absolutely. So, how can we know earlier what actions we should be taking? How can we learn from mistakes so that we don't make them again?

To me, that's been a really important aspect of my career. Growth has been shifting from the tactical side of solving the problem in front of me to the strategic side of preventing this problem from happening in the future. That starts when you're fairly junior, and it starts as a choice.

What I mean is: you're tasked with solving a problem. But if you're aware of this problem, you can start to think about how you might prevent it in the future and start bringing solutions to your stakeholders.

In people in leadership roles within ediscovery, something is common amongst all of you: a willingness to step into the unknown. Nobody woke up thinking they could just do everything. There's no superpower here. You're comfortable working with a puzzle where all the pieces are upside-down. There's no box; you just start turning the pieces over. You're curious that way.

I frequently ask myself, and I would encourage a lot of ediscovery professionals to do the same: is this what I want to be doing forever? Because if I don't do something about it, it is what I will be doing forever, and I'll get very good at it. But then I'll just be managing people who do this same thing.

If I want to go abroad, I'm going to have to take a risk. I'm going to have to look for other problems to help solve. Most importantly, I'm going to have to drive value. And I'm going to have to understand what that means, because it means something different to different stakeholders.

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