The Legal Data Intelligence Podcast with David Cowen (Episode 16)

In this episode of Careers and The Business of Law: The Legal Data Intelligence Series, host David Cowen talks to Brad Kolacinski on a range of themes such as threat intelligence, risk monitoring, compliance, and related areas that span his work. Kolacinski delves into the myriad ways in which Legal Data Intelligence practitioners can bring value to legal teams today: synthesizing different types of data to discover new insights and find actionable information; leveraging current technology tailwinds; using data and technology to proactively solve challenges, and adapting one’s discovery experience and skillsets to different use cases.

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

David Cowen: What's Legal Data Intelligence today? It's not just ediscovery, it's so much more than that. Can you kick us off?

Brad Kolacinski: For me, I think Legal Data Intelligence is about taking traditional discovery tools, people, processes and applying those to broader legal and compliance data challenges. So, if we look at the adjacencies, folks in legal are asked to tackle privacy, cyber, internal investigations, contract life cycle management, and so on. Discovery technology, people, and processes are no longer confined to solving litigation support type problems. I think people have realized that we can use our expertise to solve other types of problems. For example, we are not just a discovery provider. We do work in the realm of security, cyber and geopolitical risk, and broader investigative and compliance support. We're constantly asked by our colleagues to use data and technology to solve other types of issues outside of the legal compliance bucket.

Can you provide examples?

I think one of the things that I get most excited about is the work that we do in the world of threat intelligence and monitoring. Our team in our discovery and data insights practice works really closely with our experts in our crisis and security consulting teams. There are folks on that team that are former heads of the FBI's behavioral threat assessment unit. These are like the big PhD-brain Mindhunter types, if you watched that show back in the day, and are able to kind of understand and identify potential workplace violence risks we're talking about, like real active shooter scenario type situations that we're looking to prevent here. And so our kind of digital risk team, our crisis and security consulting experts, our behavioral threat experts work with us to perform really large scale data scraping. So think about social media, about deep and dark web looking for threats against the enterprise. And again, these are often threats of real potential workplace violence. And so our acute crisis management and intelligence gathering were retained by some of the largest companies in the world to proactively identify and investigate threats against their people, their assets, their brand. And that requires mass data, collection analysis, leveraging AI sentiment analysis, active learning, remediating false positives, identifying potentially problematic posts and threats against people or assets of the company. And so there's a lot of ediscovery technology that's applied throughout that workflow—things that we've learned that we've become very accustomed to doing in an EDRM framework that are now solving a problem that's well outside of legal compliance.