The Legal Data Intelligence Podcast with David Cowen (Episode 10)

Revolutionizing the way the legal industry manages data is at the heart of the Legal Data Intelligence project. In this episode of Careers and The Business of Law: The Legal Data Intelligence Series, host David Cowen sits down with Jeremiah Weasenforth, legal analytics director at Edward Jones. In this conversation, Weasenforth dives into why legal professionals should care about Legal Data Intelligence and how it can expand career horizons by enabling them to take on the full spectrum of data challenges affecting the legal industry.

He also talks about the impact of the boom in generative AI, how the industry is adapting, and his advice for legal professionals looking to carve a niche at the intersection of the law, data, and technology.

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

David Cowen: What is Legal Data Intelligence and why should people care? Do you have any use cases that can hook the audience into what Legal Data Intelligence is?

Jeremiah Weasenforth: We've gone over the history of ediscovery and the history of technical innovation in the legal industry—from documents, to data, to insights, to stories that we are telling across the space. Legal Data Intelligence is designed to give you insights into the work that you're already doing across the legal industry.

Why care about something like Legal Data Intelligence as a transactional lawyer? Imagine a new deal comes in—it's on the other side's paper, huge business value. Let's say it's a multi-million dollar deal and we need a transaction lawyer to look at that contract and to negotiate and get us to deal close. Right away, that transactional lawyer looks at this and says, “Oh, that indemnification provision, that's going to be a real problem for us.” Historically he would go to his business counterpart, the general counsel, and say, “Here's the problem. Here's what we need to try to spend months negotiating around. And here's the risk that that creates if we don't get to that space.” That was great work that that transactional lawyer was doing. But what Legal Data Intelligence does is to try to bring you one step further. It’s about looking at the history of the way those contracts have been negotiated, similarly situated, and saying, “How many of those that come in are on the other side's paper? How many of those don't align with our playbook? How many turns in the contract do we end up taking across time? What percentage of the time do we actually get to an indemnification provision that we love? What are the common factors and the common situations where we agree to the indemnification, which requires us to take on a significant amount of risk, and how does that really start to impact the legal value of the deal?” All of that data intelligence can be brought to the forefront for that transaction attorney so that the next time they see a contract like that, they can go to the business stakeholder immediately and say that the technology has automatically identified this data intelligence.

I hear you and others now beginning to talk about a whole new quadrant; a new way of thinking that’s more strategic and less tactical. Can you put that into context or give us an analogy?

I love how you've laid that out. It’s giving you information and it's unlocking conditions that you didn't even anticipate as you were going down this path. It's opening up your eyes to information that you didn't expect. I think about it in other contexts, like the litigation practice. You might know that a certain motion is unlikely to succeed—but you don't know, historically, using data intelligence, just how much work went into that motion based on the document review and the exhibit identification, based on how this has been handled with this opposing counsel in the past, or how it’s has been handled in this industry in the past. It's really opening your eyes to saying: “Look, there's more than just the four corners of the case that I'm working on. There's actually a holistic piece of data intelligence that's flowing through everything that we do.”

Why not start to capture that in the same way the business industry captures business intelligence? At Netflix, there is intelligence around their entire user base that they're pushing to the forefront to make movie recommendations for you. Why are we not doing that in the legal space? I think a lot of us have been, and we now have the Legal Data Intelligence vocabulary to go into that room with the skeptical patent lawyer and say, “This is it what we should do and consider because it's going to arm you with more information to help you drive more value to your clients.”

When we had TAR, it was like a drip of data and choices. Then we went from drip to waterfall. Are we at the flood stage or the fire hose stage of inputs and insights?

It's like a geyser that's exploded toward us. I really do believe that. If you take a step back, generative AI is the big buzz and it is absolutely a revolution in the AI space. But take a step back from that and think about our technical innovation—from an automation perspective, from the low-code, no-code perspective. The barrier to capturing key information, to making predictions around technology, tools, issues, whatever it may be, it used to be pretty high. It'd be difficult to understand how a machine learning model works, or how to build an algorithm. Now, everybody kind of understands. They've played around with ChatGPT. They've seen in their personal life how their information can be automatically captured. And so GCs are talking about this in a completely different way. They're thinking about this in a completely different way. And it's why now is the exact right time to adopt this language, this Legal Data Intelligence framework. To say we should be running the business of legal differently, on the law firm side, from an in-house perspective, and within the vendor community.

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