The Legal Data Intelligence Podcast with David Cowen (Episode 23)

In this episode of Careers and the Business of Law: The Legal Data Intelligence Series, host David Cowen speaks with Carl Morrison. Morrison deftly breaks down the concepts of SUN (Sensitive, Useful, or Necessary) and ROT (Redundant, Obsolete, or Trivial) data. He also expounds on the role that LDI and AI can play in leveraging dormant data to generate business insights, and how it can turn data into a strategic advantage for early case assessment and risk mitigation. Morrison’s detailed and thoughtful responses to Cowen’s questions paint a vivid picture of LDI’s impact on the future of legal operations.

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

David Cowen: You’re really one of the cool kids in career jungle gym. I mean you go back to the early days of ediscovery, and here you are now in a very cool role as the senior manager of legal operations at Otsuka.

Carl Morrison: Yeah, it's interesting when you look at what's going on with me in professional life on that jungle gym. Coming from gaming and hospitality for numerous years, jumping into a startup global law practice to now coming back in-house for a pharmaceutical company. I've always thought and always have said that we sit on a gold mine of data as legal operations professionals. If you truly understand what you're sitting on, you're sitting on a gold mine of data that you can leverage to analyze, to understand how you're going to run legal like a business. And historically, we haven't leveraged it. We're now at a point that we understand that in order to really drive the business, the legal, we’ve got to really understand that data. And that data can be clean, it can be pure. But it can be dirty as well. You got to sift through the dirtiness of that data. And so for me, professionally, I'm in a position to help elevate litigation, data management, information governance, and things of that nature. The end goal really is to mine that data that we're sitting on to really drive legal as a business.

How is LDI making legal teams think differently about data?

As an industry, we have a tendency to sit on dirty data, right? We don't do enough of cleaning up our house; we don’t get rid of that ROT [data]. Historically, we've tried to get to the SUN data, which is the strategic, useful and necessary data that helps us run legal like a business. So, when we clean our house and get rid of the ROT, we're sitting on clean data in order to help really drive value. Leveraging AI, leveraging tools can help get us to that strategic point of the data where data can be useful and drive value. And that's where we really need to grow as a function, as an industry.