The Legal Data Intelligence Podcast with David Cowen (Episode 4)

What is the origin story for Legal Data Intelligence? How can ambitious legal professionals carve out a career in this emerging space? Development paths abound in Legal Data Intelligence for those with legal, technical, and people skills (or a combination thereof), if they are ready to grow and advocate for themselves as the industry becomes more defined.

Farrah Pepper, chief legal innovation counsel at Marsh McLennan, is no stranger to this process. In this episode of David Cowen’s podcast, “Careers and The Business of Law: The Legal Data Intelligence Series,” Pepper discusses her professional journey and her advice for those who want to make a name for themselves in the burgeoning field of Legal Data Intelligence.

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

David Cowen: Six years ago, you proposed a chief innovation counsel role to a major corporation. You pitched it and they recognized that you were seeing the future. You weren't looking for an evolving ediscovery role; you were looking at something new. That says a lot about where we are right now as we've gone from documents to data.

Farrah Pepper: I think you nailed it. You know, one of the things that resonated so much with me when we started having what would become the LDI discussion is that it felt familiar. It was déjà vu. I've been in that conversation before; I've been at that table before. And we were all feeling it.

What made it really cool this time around was that it wasn't just me with some idea, trying to get it out there and put vocabulary around it. This time, it was 20-some of the smartest people I know all saying, at the same time “we have this inclination, we have this vision, we have this shared idea that there's something more there,” and then working collaboratively to name it, to give it life, to give it real use cases, real job descriptions. I mean, talk about a fun extracurricular activity. This one takes the cake.

All of this is like an ocean and there are waves. Sometimes you get caught out there riding a wave, and you don't know how to surf but you do your best and maybe you make it to shore. But then there are more waves. And maybe you've learned how to fashion that surfboard and you have a choice: you can ride that surfboard by yourself and make it to shore, or you can start to offer some boards to some fellow travelers and say, “Come with me. I'm going to show you how to ride the waves.”

I think we're experiencing a generation of professionals who have first caught waves alone, and then found fellow travelers to ride perhaps the ediscovery wave, or the legal operations wave, or the data privacy wave. But they’re now converging on one big beach and saying: “Wait a minute, we thought it was just that cove, but now we see the ocean. Let's all ride it together.”

Can you introduce people to how you negotiate for the gig you really want? What tips can you share in that regard?

You know, I love this kind of discussion because I'm not even sure it's a negotiation anymore as much as a conversation. Careers have evolved. Companies have evolved. Really smart leaders in organizations have evolved and are listening to the people they work with and want to work with.

I was fortunate in my journey from having a highly specialized role at GE. I was the first global discovery counsel that they had ever hired at corporate. The blessing and the curse of that role was that I loved it so much, and I learned so much—but the more I learned and the deeper I got into discovery, the more I saw that discovery and the tools and the processes and the people could solve all sorts of things in the organization. So it was the curse of sight, if you will.

When I was approached by Marsh McLennan and their then general counsel, the outreach was because they were looking, or so they thought, for a global discovery counsel—exactly what I was doing at GE. When we got to talking and I started probing about what they were doing and what they wanted to do, my counter was, “No, I don't want to just repeat exactly what I've done before. And sure, I'll solve that for you, because I know how. But here's what I'm really interested in.”

What I did pitch was something that, at the time, I had no idea was a legal data intelligence pitch. Because I knew that, when you are excellent at ediscovery, you are excellent at a lot of things. You can identify and solve problems. You're great with tech. You're great with people. You're basically a Swiss Army knife of skills that can solve problems for a corporation. My vision was for, what I called it at the time, an innovation-based role. I proposed the idea of having a legal innovation and technology team, not a discovery team. And it was broader in remit. I proposed this idea for my current role, which is chief legal innovation counsel—and fortunately, I say it wasn't really a negotiation because when I explained myself, our general counsel listened, nodded, and said: “I like it.”

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

I came in at the beginning of the beginning of ediscovery. There were not a lot of job descriptions around, but pretty soon there were directors, project managers, analysts, specialists. I see that happening today in this legal space. There's a lot of room for a lot of people. Some emerging roles that stand out to me are: legal chief of staff; the legal chief operating officer; and one I'm just beginning to envision, the legal data intelligence officer. These are the folks in charge of all of this data, making what was invisible now become visible with data intelligence driven by legal. Any thoughts?

I love everything you're saying. I think there are a lot of exciting opportunities with all of those. I'll throw out there that I think there may still be longevity for the role that I'm currently in. This chief legal innovation counsel or officer—we have yet to define these enough to know, might this become part of one of these other roles? Is it something that's standalone? The exciting part about what I'm doing every day is how we're still defining these roles. I think what's clear is that there's a renewed appetite, especially within corporations, to be creative, to be nimble, to be assets to the business. To not be the Department of No, but be the Department of Why Not. And all of those impulses, I think, are what's spurring all these different new classes of roles. Because they all have the same goal: Let's be better. Let's do better. Let's make our business better.

The early stage of my journey was very much focused on showing the proof in the pudding, taking some projects on, showing the possibilities. And once that trust gets established, then there can be growth. My team, I'm fortunate to say, has steadily grown. We're still a small and nimble team, but we are bigger than we've ever been right now. And that is because our organization, I believe, knows how seriously we take this responsibility we've been handed and how really ferocious we are on behalf of our organization, on behalf of the company, to get positive results. So we are out there really connecting with our colleagues, being creative, coming up with solutions, focusing on really a lot of the humanity of law.

If you ask me what it takes to be successful in a role like this, I'll rattle off things that may not be traditional in legal. You have to be a storyteller; you have to be a connector; you have to be empathetic; you have to really listen to people to understand them. It's all the people skills—and then you wrap that within a legal container and you've got yourself some exciting legal roles.

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