The Legal Data Intelligence Podcast with David Cowen (Episode 22)

In this episode of Careers and the Business of Law: The Legal Data Intelligence Series, host David Cowen speaks with Benjamin Sexton. Sexton presents the Legal Data Intelligence (LDI) model as a watershed moment in the evolution of ediscovery as it enables practitioners to solve data challenges across a vast list of use cases that go beyond litigation. Listen to this episode to hear Sexton’s thoughtful and perceptive insights on the role of AI, the power of collaboration, and the importance of being a constant learner in a rapidly changing legal landscape.

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

David Cowen: Talk to me about Legal Data Intelligence—the collaboration, the different points of view and the coming together of people from different backgrounds.

Benjamin Sexton: I think LDI is a reframing of our vision of who we are and what we're capable of. It's a new way of looking at what we do. It’s the realization that we can solve problems that have been major challenges for other divisions and other people within the company. And that takes a sort of mindset shift. I was resistant to the idea of LDI at first— you know I like being a discovery person. I like specializing. It’s an area where a lot of interesting problems abound and where there’s plenty to chew on. But the more I talk to senior management and to other divisions, and our clients, the more I realize that there are tools and skills that we have that can solve their problems. We’ve been in the digital age for decades now and it’s brutally obvious that the information out there is vast and that it needs to be mined for all kinds of purposes, insights, and to create business value. It therefore shouldn’t be a surprise that the experts in structuring unstructured data and finding what information is relevant are really good at things outside ediscovery.

How has AI impacted productivity for you. What’s been that AI dividend for you and your team?

We're actually using our creativity and experience to make decisions rather than just execute repeated tasks. Not that there's anything wrong with that kind of work, but to me that's a new, powerful arrow in the quiver. AI is a great example of transplantable technology that we're using within ediscovery and outside of ediscovery ... AI has completely nuked my life. AI replaces — very loosely speaking — thousands of hours of manual labor. But it concentrates that on the very few people that are running it right. So like when you're the one who has to make all of the little discoveries that influence the instructions for an AI model, and you have to learn months of knowledge for a sampling technique—that’s a lot of pressure (laughs). It’s a lot of responsibility. So for me, personally, it has taken over my world in terms of my work. But in terms of the benefits for the people paying for it, AI is significant. We're doing things that we didn’t think were possible earlier—we reviewed over half a million documents in a 24-hour period for a recent project. And with exceptional validation results.