The Legal Data Intelligence Podcast with David Cowen (Episode 15)

In this episode of Careers and the Business of Law: The Legal Data Intelligence Series, host David Cowen talks to Alison Grounds, Managing Partner of Troutman eMerge, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Troutman Pepper. Cowen quizzes Grounds on a range of exciting developments at the intersection of data, technology, and the law.

Their conversation is peppered with interesting discursions into the evolution of the role of data in helping lawyers make informed decisions, litigation readiness, the changing role of discovery practitioners, and the throwback quality of Leon Bridges’ musical genius.

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

David Cowen: You've been playing with data, working with data, diligently diving into the possibilities of data for 20 years. What do you see happening next?

Alison Grounds: The attention to data is so heightened with generative AI and just the value of information. And we're really focused on it. And people are having to ramp up quickly. I also think people are getting access to data and technology in ways they weren't before. So they were interacting with the AI when they needed an intermediary or that was done by other teams. Now you can be directly involved, and you can see the benefit of the data in a way that's I think different than it was historically. It was more of a back-end process and something that just didn't have as much of a real-time impact. And I think you're really seeing that shift. And you see it in the hiring. You see it in the open postings for data analysts, and you see it in the, gosh, the articles and the CLE. I mean, you can't get away from it now, which is, I think, good news. And I think it'll settle down, and we will separate the wheat from the chaff, or whatever the old-timey phrase is for that. But I think the attention is good. I think the velocity is good. And now it's a matter of getting it right.

When you're working with clients today, what percentage of your work is proactive vs. reactive?

I would say at least 70 percent of my time on active client work is spent on proactive planning, litigation readiness, policy development, people, process, and technology related to ediscovery and data governance issues. And that is a big shift compared to what I was doing. It's nice to be able to be on the front end and be more proactive and to be able to be engaged early when they're adopting new technologies, when they're trying to stay ahead and implement. It's refreshing to be able to spend more time strategically thinking and helping clients on the front end proactively.

The way I used to think about the value of data when I thought about ediscovery and litigation and internal investigations, it seemed kind of binary almost. Whereas the value of data, you know, if you're sitting in a legal department, it seems like you can use it. It was like a one slice pie. And now it's a two or three or four slice pie.

I think that's right. And I think it's been interesting too, because when I first started our practice at Troutman, I called it the EDDM team, Electronic Discovery and Data Management. And I thought, oh everyone is of course going to realize that the bulk of the discovery problem is a data problem, we're going to focus on managing data better. And that just didn't happen. People didn't focus on that. They stayed in a more defensive posture. They didn't want to spend the time or the energy to manage data. And then I think you saw sort of a shift where people realized and companies realized the risk of not paying attention to data with data security and privacy concerns becoming top of mind.

And now I almost feel like we're in a third era. Nobody really cares about it as much as they should. And so they're either keeping things around forever in case they might need it someday, or they're disposing of things that could be valuable. Then we moved into that middle era where they realized the risks associated with over-retention and improper use, right? The privacy concerns also meant maybe we can't, we kept all this data around thinking it'd be useful one day, but we realized we don't even have the right to use it in a way that would be useful to our clients or to our business. And now it seems like kind of where we're balancing both the benefits of having the data with the risks, but realizing how important it is to know what we have and where it sits and why it's there and how we can use it, which really impacts almost every part of the legal practice.