The Legal Data Intelligence Podcast with David Cowen (Episode 27)

In this episode of Careers and the Business of Law: The Legal Data Intelligence Series, host David Cowen speaks with Odette Claridge (Engagement Manager, ProSearch), Virginia Ring (Principal, Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP), and Tara Lawler (Partner, Morgan Lewis).

In this episode, the interviewees present Legal Data Intelligence as a concrete and holistic approach to solving legal data challenges. Not an abstract concept or a set of principles but a working framework with a growing library of resources such as practical toolkits, checklists, and actionable ideas that can transform how modern legal teams deal with contracts, speed up mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures, while still maintaining their commitment to privacy, security, and defensibility. They cite two specific toolkits as examples to illustrate LDI’s practical value: the LDI Contract Management Toolkit and the LDI Mergers, Acquisitions, and Divestitures Guide.

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

David Cowen: We're going to be talking about mergers and acquisitions and divestitures. We're going to jump right into it. How are you working with mergers, acquisitions and divestitures today compared to two or three years ago? What is different today?

Odette Claridge: We are in the Corporate working group. Our group created a toolkit for mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures. We also created a toolkit for contract management. On the M&A&D side, the toolkit is really for the legal professional who is working on setting the stage for a deal. We are helping them navigate the stakeholders, the roles, responsibilities, technologies, and just how to really orchestrate the transaction.

Tara Lawler: There's obviously this explosion of data now. When you were doing a merger or a divestiture ten years ago, you would have employee hard drives, email, and it was relatively simple. But now, you have all these third-party apps, and communication tools. And so some of it may be subject to record retention, ongoing preservation obligations, and just useful information for either company. Identifying all of that data and making sure that it's going to the right company; that it's being tracked; and that if you don't need it anymore, it's being disposed of. And if it needs to be preserved, making sure you are preserving it. Getting your hands around this huge volume of data and finding the useful data in it that needs to be maintained.

If you look two years or three years ahead, what does the future look like?

Lawler: It's going to be LDI with a lot of generative AI on top of it. In 2026, we are going to be figuring out how AI is going to layer into all of these things— the work product, toolkits, and the checklists that we're creating.

Virginia Ring: I think the legal industry right now is changing so rapidly through AI. And it's hard to kind of picture where we're going to be in three to five years. It’s hard to even wrap your mind around it because everything is changing so rapidly. I do think that the framework that we're putting together through LDI is going to exist and guide everyone as we're approaching this new world of AI. So, I'm excited to continue working with the LDI team.

Claridge: What I would like to see is for LDI to kind of be the first stop for people. Say they're working on a second request. LDI is where they come to download the framework, the toolkit, and then move forward with the recommended checklist. So it's kind of my goal for LDI to be something like that, where it's kind of the first stop for every legal data professional to come and get the framework.