Terra Incognita: How Taking on The Unfamiliar Opened New Doors for These LDI Leaders

A key attribute of Legal Data Intelligence (LDI) practitioners is the willingness to apply their skills to data challenges across a range of use cases. Even though LDI practitioners hail from a diversity of backgrounds (such as litigation, transactional law, contract law, legal operations, and more), they have deliberately sought out unfamiliar challenges and taken on new projects outside of or adjacent to their practice area.

As an example, consider how LDI founding member Briordy Meyers (Privacy Director, Capital One), who had spent the early years of his legal career in the discovery world, found himself at the deep end of a major privacy project during the implementation of arguably the most important privacy act of our time.

Meyers, who was working at pharmaceutical giant Boehringer Ingelheim, was asked to facilitate the cross-border transfer of relevant data from the company’s German servers to the US to meet US discovery obligations. “The challenge really was identifying personal information (PI), protecting it, but also minimizing the data set. But at the core of it, it was making sure that we were protecting the PI to meet GDPR obligations,” said Meyers during a panel discussion (A New Innovation Paradigm: Unveiling the Legal Data Intelligence Model) at Relativity Fest London in 2024.

Meyers became a go-between, liaising with the German team whose priority was GDPR compliance, while at the same time being accountable to the American team that was working against production deadlines and managing the expectations of outside counsel.

There was this natural tension between how the US team thought about data and how the Germans thought about it. And I had to find a bridge between them.” Meyers got to work. He got a CIPP/E (Certified Information Privacy Professional/Europe) certification to become fluent in the language of EU privacy professionals.

The problem was not just quantitative but also qualitative. “We weren’t just looking for PII for HIPPA compliance, we were looking for PI in a much deeper way; in a way that would satisfy our German counterparts,” said Meyers. The task required a technology solution that could both handle large data volumes and conduct discrete and specific analytical tasks with a high degree of accuracy.

At a time when generative AI was still a few years away, and even primitive AI was considered frontier tech, Meyers partnered with a startup to work on an AI model that could identify and redact PI.

Meyers was able to accelerate and streamline the process and ultimately get the job done in a fraction of the time and cost that would have otherwise gone into the effort.

The work product was going to be held to exacting standards and needed to meet the expectations of both European data protection regulators and the company’s Works Council (or Betriebsrat). The Works Council was charged with ensuring that employee data was handled correctly in compliance with data protection laws. “Using an AI tool was tantamount to processing data. So I was required to explain in detail how we were using the AI on the use case.”

Like Meyers, there is another LDI founding member who has made a habit of proactively seeking out new and unfamiliar projects outside the well-trodden path. Adam Rouse (Senior Counsel and Director of eDiscovery Operations, Walgreens) was not the first person that Walgreens’ compliance team thought of after they received a regulatory inquiry that entailed a significant data burden.

The project reached Rouse’s desk only after the compliance team struggled over several weeks to figure out how to respond. Dealing with over 2.5 million documents and several terabytes of data under the shadow of a looming regulatory deadline would have seemed like a daunting challenge to any other team. But not to Rouse and his team who were accustomed to working on time-sensitive litigation projects with large data profiles. “It was just another Tuesday for us,” said Rouse during a panel discussion titled Transforming Opportunity Into Action: Legal Data Challenges and AI, which was held at Relativity Fest 2024 in Chicago.

Rouse applied the same technology and process that he was using in his litigation engagements: concept analysis, concept clustering, and communications analysis. “We built out a three-tiered AI-assisted review workflow that was very new and innovative for the compliance team. But, for us, it was familiar because of our work on the litigation side.”

Ultimately, what seemed like it would take years to complete was accomplished in just a few months. “We were able to strip away all the ROT (Redundant, Obsolete, Trivial) data which in this case was 2,475,000 documents. We were able to get to the data that really mattered." Indeed, being able to identify the SUN (Sensitive, Useful, Necessary) data was crucial in determining the company’s level of legal risk and exposure pertaining to the regulatory enquiry.

“With this knowledge, we were able to craft a response to the regulatory agency in such a way that it proved that we did a methodical and thorough investigation,” said Rouse.

The collaboration between Rouse and the compliance team enabled him to break the barriers and lack of communication between the two teams. It further helped them formalize a business process and workflow that became the foundation for future collaborations. “We now regularly assist our international compliance department in global investigations every time they come up.”