The Legal Data Intelligence Podcast with David Cowen (Episode 11)

David Cowen’s podcast, Careers and the Business of Law: The Legal Data Intelligence Series, explores topics ranging from career development, the fusion of technical expertise with a legal aptitude, and the examination of Legal Data Intelligence as a new paradigm to address the legal industry’s data woes. In this podcast, Adam Rouse from Walgreens covers them all.

Rouse is Senior Counsel and Director of eDiscovery at Walgreens and has helped build ediscovery teams and strategies at diverse organizations throughout his career. He and Cowen spent their time on the podcast talking about what it takes to evolve alongside a rapidly changing data landscape, how Legal Data Intelligence is poised to help professionals catapult their careers into the future, and much more.

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

David Cowen: Your background is one of curiosity. You and I have known each other for a while. I know you're curious about music, books, literature, and culture and society and history. It takes that kind of curiosity to build a program from scratch and get from now to next, as you have. And that's what you're doing now with LDI, right? Can you walk us through the journey of how and why you've gotten involved with the Legal Data Intelligence project?

Adam Rouse: I think it was, gosh, close to two years ago now. Some folks in my network and I would talk when we'd see each other at industry events. This time, Omar Haroun had a great idea and came to me and said, “Hey, there's this thing we're talking about. It's trying to find commonality between all these different functions that deal with legal data. Would you be interested in talking to the team and evaluating and figuring out where we start?” And I said, absolutely.

I think you’re right—it does take a certain amount of intellectual curiosity. As a lifelong learner, I'm always happy to get in there and participate and learn new things. That's what I view this as a great opportunity to do. And we've done that. We've come up with a framework. We've built some solid foundations and tried to elevate the LDI into its own living, breathing community and entity. And I can say that after two years, the team is very, very proud of what we've accomplished.

What are some of the things that you're working on now or that you're most proud of what you've created so far?

I think the job descriptions we put together, which are available on the website for anyone who'd like to take a look, are super critical. Unifying some of the job responsibilities and giving a name to what so many people in the legal profession are already doing—it’s one of the things that I'm very proud of. When you look at mythology or some of these other cultural things, giving a name to something gives it power, right? I think there's something to that. Giving a name to all these folks in the legal industry who are building careers around Legal Data Intelligence gives us, as a collective, power.

If you go to a CFO or someone in HR, how do you describe the work we're all doing right now? It's difficult. There are many titles: ediscovery analyst, data analyst, internal investigations specialist, you name it. We're all using a very specialized job title. But by showing how all those roles have the same common core—that's what we really talk about in LDI, the common core. We're all doing, at the heart of it, very similar work. So if your title is “ediscovery analyst,” when we talk about going from now to next and the career jungle gym, how do you progress? You're almost pigeonholed into an ediscovery career track, which doesn't do anyone a good service. I think it does a disservice to the many career tracks in the industry. Because you have HR folks who may not understand that this job is compatible with another—like compliance. I believe that common name is what empowers us to shed light; if you'll forgive the pun, we can bring sun into the field and really show what we're doing.

Let’s talk about AI. There’s enormous investment capital being allocated to it. And all this next-gen technology will require LDI-type skills and talent to be effectively deployed.

Around four years ago, I did a talk on AI—long before ChatGPT and other kinds of generative AI models. I made a recommendation at the end of my talk to say, hey, you know what you need to do? Read 15 minutes a week on something new in the AI field, stay current on the news, set that Google alert, and dig into it. And I think people that did that are well positioned now. I think careers are going to change. We're going to have additional market disruptions. And when we talk about what do we do or how do we prepare, we're going to have these new job roles. LDI is a framework for how we're going to work in the future.

And it's starting now. It's starting today. There are people now that are going out and writing job descriptions based on the LDI profile. It's a very highly downloaded doc from our website. People are really trying to take that to heart. And I encourage them to do that. I encourage people who want to accelerate their career, go download the job description of the job you want. No one's saying that you can't, you know, figure out what you want to do, figure out where you want to be, and start learning about that stuff. Now take apart your computer, be curious about AI and how it functions, you know, go sign up for a ChatGPT account. Do the free one, do the $20 a month one, do whatever's in your budget, but just go play with it. Figure out how prompts work.

I think I'll make another prediction here with you, David, hot off the presses. I truly believe that in within three to five years, there will be job descriptions for prompt engineering. Because the AI has to be told very, very specifically in a very creative way how to do what we want it to do. And so we're going to need people who are experts at prompting the machine to do what we want it to do. Three years ago, two years ago, if you would have said, I think there's going to be a job called prompt engineering, people would have looked at you and been like, you are crazy. But look where we are now in just that short span of time, 24 months. That's how quickly the market is changing.