The Legal Data Intelligence Podcast with David Cowen (Episode 29)

In this episode of Careers and the Business of Law: The Legal Data Intelligence Series, host David Cowen is joined by LDI founding member Adam Rouse, Senior Counsel and Director of Legal Operations at Walgreens; founding member Ashley Christakis, former Senior Manager of Legal Data Intelligence at CrowdStrike; founding member John Koss, Head of Innovation, AI, and E-Data Consulting at Mintz; and Major Baisden, CEO at Lineal Services.

The conversation centers on a question many legal teams are quietly wrestling with: how do you evaluate technology when the problem itself isn't fully defined? The group's answer has less to do with tool selection than with organizational discipline — documenting how work actually gets done, starting before the data is clean, and accepting that most departments are still somewhere between ad hoc and operational on the maturity arc. The episode's sharpest argument: the real AI dividend isn't efficiency. It's the ability to do things that were simply never possible before.

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

David Cowen: Where do you think we are on the AI journey?

Adam Rouse: I think it depends on the organization... I don't believe anyone's still out there kind of sticking their fingers in their ears, pretending that they don't hear or see anything about AI. It's in the market, we've all heard about it ad nauseum. And the AI sparkle is just on every single product label that you can think of. But past that, there are some programs that are still in that ad hoc nature. They're bringing in a tool to fill a need and then moving on to perhaps an entirely different tool to fill a different need. And it's not in that operational status in terms of being efficient... just having a consistent, documented workflow that includes some of these tools. And I think the forward thinkers are definitely in the operational stage at this point.

Major, what makes AI more successful, and how does that change what legal teams should be doing right now?

Major Baisden: Documentation, documentation, documentation of how you actually get work done is the most important thing, especially when you're dealing with this AI adoption process and phase that we are all drinking from a fire hose from. Because the more you can document your current business processes, the more you can surface information and data that lives across different silos in your organization, the more effective you are going to be at identifying inefficiencies and then, of course, finding and bending these tools in a way so that you can get to your strategic initiatives. So one of the things that I think is most important and just critical for operationalization of these types of technologies is to stop thinking in terms of a particular use case and start thinking about how am I doing my work because how I'm doing my work is going to change.

Ashley, can you explain SUN?

Ashley Christakis: SUN is sensitive, useful, and necessary. And it's basically trying to surface all of those things out of the sea of data that we're constantly dealing with, which we call rot. And so it really is outlining and shining the light on the stuff — the legal data intelligence — that you need to make your business decisions.

Is productivity really the real AI dividend?

John Koss: Those are tasks that we could never have done pre-generative AI... not just generating content and creating new, but also using AI to empower figuring out what you do have, improving it, and identifying it.