The Legal Data Intelligence Podcast with David Cowen (Episode 31)
Josh Kreamer, CEO, Seedless, and Daniel Semelhack, Director, JND Legal Administration
Author: LDI Team
In this episode of Careers and the Business of Law: The Legal Data Intelligence Series, host David Cowen speaks with LDI founding member Josh Kreamer and LDI Architect Daniel Semelhack. They discuss the LDI Corporate Group's new toolkit, "Pathways to Corporate AI Adoption: A Practical Framework from Legal Data Intelligence," and break down how legal teams can systematically evaluate AI tools, manage risks like shadow AI, and build defensible workflows that drive real utilization.
This toolkit was jointly created by Architects Odette Claridge, Yvonne Ike, Tim Kurucz, Tara Lawler, Jenya Moshkovich, Virginia Ring, Daniel Semelhack, Jack Thompson, and Nicholas Wittenberg, and founding members Josh Kreamer and Bobby Malhotra.
Listen to the full episode and read a partial transcript below.
David Cowen: When you and the team got together to build this toolkit, what was the core problem you were trying to solve?
Daniel Semelhack: There are a lot of corporations in various phases of AI adoption, and throughout any implementation lifecycle, there are failure points that can happen across scoping, validation, governance, and adoption. The point of this toolkit is to define those potential failure points and share practical best practices along the way.
It's completely tool-agnostic, applying to any AI technology you're evaluating through the lens of an eDiscovery or litigation professional. It also brings a level of practicality that I think has been missing. Sometimes AI isn't even the right option for a problem; maybe you just need to change a workflow or automate standard tasks. The framework gives teams the flexibility to jump in and out depending on whether they're at a beginner, intermediate, or advanced level.
Toolkit
Pathways to Corporate AI Adoption: A Practical Framework from Legal Data Intelligence
Get the ToolkitWhy is there such an important distinction between AI adoption and AI utilization?
Josh Kreamer: The checklist really helps teams move from adoption to utilization. Adoption simply means you brought the tool in and everyone can say, "We have this tool." Utilization means people are actually using it in their daily work.
It's only through utilization that you start to see a real return on your investment. The framework helps legal departments move past the proof-of-concept and experimental stages to bring tools in with a mindset built around active operational use.
What are some of the critical governance risks, like shadow AI, that legal departments need to account for?
Semelhack: Shadow AI is a huge issue right now. Departments or individuals find a fancy AI tool that helps them do their job better, but no one knows where that data is going. If team members are inputting highly sensitive client data into rogue tools, that creates major exposure. Establishing clear policies and frameworks, and ensuring people commit to them, is just as critical as vetting the enterprise tools you explicitly adopt.
Kreamer: Governance is all about trust and building guardrails so new technologies are safe for the entire organization. Where a tool might be useful in one department, it could be dangerous in another. Governance doesn't mean you have to be perfect; it means establishing strong rules that drive trust, safety, and operational reliability across the board.
How does governance connect to observability and legal defensibility in litigation?
Kreamer: In the legal space, there's a direct relationship between observability and defensibility. The more an AI tool acts as a "black box" to opposing counsel or the court, obscuring how the tool works or what's happening on the back end, the more suspicious courts will be of your process. The more you can open up observability within your governance framework, the more defensible your process becomes when you rely on these tools in live litigation.
(Editor’s Note: The partial transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)