The Legal Data Intelligence Podcast with David Cowen (Episode 7)

The explosion of unstructured data in the last two decades and its seismic impact on the day-to-day of legal work is one of the central factors behind the emergence of Legal Data Intelligence.

In this episode of David Cowen’s podcast, Careers and The Business of Law: The Legal Data Intelligence Series, he sits down with John Koss, Managing Director, E-Data Consulting Group at Mintz. In this conversation, Koss talks about the salient trends that have transformed discovery processes; he touches on how legal as a business is poised to change in the wake of Legal Data Intelligence, and how increasing adoption of generative AI will lead to the creation of new types of legal roles.

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

David Cowen: If you’re an up-and-coming legal professional now, you might be anxious about the impact of AI on your job. There might be a sense of overwhelm that you’re dealing with. How can one think about this in a more entrepreneurial and opportunistic way instead?

John Koss: This is not the first time that there's been a technology that has raised concerns around its impact on employment and humanity. But we can't be afraid of technology, especially when it is already so omnipresent around us. We are in a different place. When we were first talking about machine learning and technology-assisted review in the context of e-data, we were learning that from the experts, right? We were trying to figure out how a layperson could explain this technology to a client or to a court and help them understand that this wasn’t invented by some wizard behind a cloak—that it is actually a sophisticated data science algorithm that can perform tasks reliably, and in fact, more reliably than humans. Even 10 years ago, it was a steep learning curve.

But now, everyone knows about generative AI — they have played around with ChatGPT. They’ve used LLMs to create art and find answers to their questions. So, I think the conversation that we will need to have on generative AI is going to be a lot different compared to the conversations we were having on technology assisted review.

If you are interested in being a good lawyer today, you need to be focused on the intersection of legal and technology. You need to be thinking about how you can start deploying generative AI across more use cases in legal. You don't need a technological background to do this. You just need to have the curiosity, boldness and willingness to talk to and learn from the right people.

The ability to have technical as well as legal conversations is a rare ability. If that’s something you are willing to master, then you are well-positioned to thrive in the future.

Finding the best, most optimal way to do something was not the attitude that the legal sector has had traditionally. The best way was the billable hour. But now with all these new complexities such as the data explosion and the emergence of new technologies, how is it changing the way legal teams operate?

It's like we went from a life where you had a banker's box in a conference room and that was kind of the beginning and the ending of your litigation; or you had the company bring all the relevant files, went through them and sent them to the SEC, and that was the beginning and end of your investigation. We just don't live with that simplicity anymore. And we have data all over the place. You know, it's exploding. Because of that, we have to figure out new ways to work. And I think the challenge that we always have is you don't want to reinvent the wheel, but everyone's unique and everyone's got a slightly different setup. Every client wants to approach things in a different way or has different areas or levels of expertise. And so for us, you know, that's really the conversation. It's a conversation at the very beginning to figure out where we are on this? What is the end goal? And we can talk about this in the context of some of the LDI work we've been doing, but that's exactly it. It's like, what is the goal of this and where are we now?

So if you’re not going to be curious, you’re going to get left behind.

The key thing about Legal Data Intelligence is that it’s beyond litigation. If you're in the corporate side of your business, if you're in compliance, if you're doing intellectual property, healthcare, it doesn't matter what your sphere is. It doesn't matter if you're doing contract work or something else. There is an opportunity in every one of these areas for automation and there will be technology in all these areas. The best thing to be thinking about is what do I do today that could be made more efficient? What do I do today where I could see a technology coming in and doing it a different way? If those are conversations you can have with yourself, think critically and then take action, you've got a job for life.

If you would like to become involved with the Legal Data Intelligence project, please write to us at info@legaldataintelligence.org