The Legal Data Intelligence Podcast with David Cowen (Episode 8)

In this episode of David Cowen’s podcast, Careers and The Business of Law: The Legal Data Intelligence Series, he sits down with Omar Haroun, one of the founding members of the Legal Data Intelligence project.

Haroun walks us through his exciting entrepreneurial journey—from his early academic leanings to his social entrepreneurship endeavors in Africa, to ultimately building, scaling and finally selling a prominent legal AI startup. He also touches on some seminal trends and early ideas that culminated into the Legal Data Intelligence project and what the future holds for the legal industry as generative AI forces legal leaders to pause and reassess time-honored notions about the industry.

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

David Cowen: Over the last 20 years, we went from documents to data. Now, the industry is on the brink of another inflection point. Can you speak to what’s required to go from now to the next phase? Surely the next phase cannot happen unless the siloes that have traditionally existed in the legal industry are broken down.

Omar Haroun: Siloed thinking might sound negative but the reality is that in any capitalist society, it's actually a very good thing to specialize. For example, in machine learning, you typically will have an orchestration of different algorithms, all of which are focused on one thing. And humans are similar...I mean, if I have a knee injury, I'd rather go to a surgeon who's done a thousand knee surgeries than somebody who's only done heart surgeries.

But what's really interesting now, and especially now that we're at this inflection point with generative AI and boards and CEOs have budgets dedicated to exploring what it could mean. In this new era, if we were to take it to its natural conclusion, I think siloed thinking would finally be coming to an end. The precursor to AI is data. And if you have data living in different silos, you're never going to really take full advantage of the language models or the AI models that you're using. The one theme among all the founding members was the realization that because of the silos that have formed over the last decade or decades, we haven't been communicating with people outside of our area of practice. And that means we're missing out on a lot of the potential we have to really get out of these silos and take full advantage of this AI-human collaboration.

When you talk about data being in silos and we can't use large language models if they're all in silos, can you say a little bit more about that and the career opportunities that are out there for people?

I mean, I genuinely think Legal Data Intelligence as a function makes a lot of sense. And like any function, you're going to have people who are at the highest executive levels, people who are on the ground doing a lot of the really necessary work that's needed to be done. If you're an organization where your knowledge is currently distributed across a variety of SaaS applications in people's heads, for example, who's the person who is actually tasked with finding a way to connect all that knowledge, to both technically and from a legal and regulatory standpoint, actually do all the legwork that's needed to really enable that sort of non-siloed approach. And then kind of at the highest levels, I think one really interesting paradox that I'm thinking a lot about lately is even though large language models at first blush are great at writing emails, great at sort of drafting documents for you, the reality is the quality of that sort of AI-generated communication is definitely not anywhere near where it needs to be and it's kind of an open question of whether it'll ever get there fully or if the communication layer is actually something that humans are always going to be better at, even if they're augmented by AI.

So I think kind of at the senior levels, it'll be a lot of how do we communicate this to the CFO, to the CIO, to people who really don't understand anything about legal, or at least have very limited experience. And then on the ground, the people who are actually doing the work.

What I’ve noticed about you is that you think very differently. You think about bringing people and communities together; you think about interdependencies and synergies that can form between different people. And I wanted to bridge this theme to Legal Data Intelligence...

I was very influenced by Aristotle when I studied philosophy and Nicomachian ethics. The real takeaway was that if you want to live a deeply satisfying life and achieve what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, you have to do two things: achieve your potential and be a good person along the way. But when you think about LDI and really the group that we have who created it, and now the group that will be responsible for carrying it forward, there's been so many people who in their siloed functions have been really seeing the same thing occur again and again, which is the power of data, the power of legal data, what that has to offer the organization has just not really been fully realized.

And we finally have the group together who can actually help realize the potential of themselves, of their organizations. And really the dominant implication of this in many ways is we're living in a world right now, even in the US, where a single legal event can bankrupt the average American. And it really shouldn't be that way. There's an industry that, you know, it's not one person's fault, but we've kind of been living in a status quo where we all know it doesn't feel right that you should have to kind of pay so much money, spend so much time on some of these tasks.

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