The Legal Data Intelligence Podcast with David Cowen (Episode 26)

In this episode of Careers and the Business of Law: The Legal Data Intelligence Series, host David Cowen speaks with Richard Pachella. Pachella talks about the role of strategy in his multi-faceted role, the value of Legal Data Intelligence as a community and new paradigm, and how AI enables legal professionals to devote more time to strategy and higher-order thinking.

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

David Cowen: What's your take on LDI as a community and as a framework?

Richard Pachella: I'm so interested in being involved, because some of the things that we're talking about now, they were things that I was trying to be an evangelist for 10 years ago. There's obviously this convergence of all these different things, whether it's information security and cybersecurity. But being able to provide a framework and guide to to tackle some of these tasks and also to expand legal technology into other areas and practices. That was something I was trying to do back in 2010 when I was at Nelson Mullins—just trying to bring new technologies and expand the role from just being litigation support to being more practice support. When you talk about going from being a doer to being a strategist, it's really more of that educational role. I remember at one point somebody asked me how I saw myself as a manager. And I said that I see myself as a teacher; I want to teach the people that I work with. I want to skill them up. I want them to grow and evolve beyond even what I can do. And that's kind of how I view my role now.

There's diversity of talent coming from so many different places. Talk about the talent in your team right now.

Sure. I mean, within our organization, we've got data scientists; right now, we are hiring for AI talent, consultants who can work with clients on building workloads, managing workloads and prompt engineering.

We’re also pulling people in from corporations, people who are practitioners of law. Also, folks like myself who are from law firms, people who have been in legal support roles.

Technology is constantly evolving. Technology is constantly changing the challenges that we have to face. Especially since COVID, the way that we communicate and the way that we do business has changed so much. We need to evolve to handle these challenges on a daily basis.

Every new technology that comes out, every new way that we're going to communicate presents a new challenge that we have to figure out how to tackle. And, you know, having the breadth and depth of resources that we have here is just incredible.