The Legal Data Intelligence Podcast with David Cowen (Episode 9)

In this episode of Careers and The Business of Law: The Legal Data Intelligence Series, host David Cowen sits down with Briordy Meyers, Discovery Counsel at Google. In this conversation, Meyers break down the core concepts underlying the Legal Data Intelligence (LDI) model, the emerging use cases and new roles that will take hold as LDI makes its impact felt across the legal industry. Finally, he touches on some of his career milestones that have helped him become a Legal Data Intelligence leader.

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

David Cowen: Let's just start with the basics. What’s ROT? What’s SUN?

Briordy Meyers: Folks in the ediscovery space, or the information governance or records retention space have heard of ROT data before. The acronym stands for redundant, outdated and trivial data. What it means is the data that exists within your organization that basically isn't needed anymore. That's kind of, you know, the extra stuff that people keep around because they think they're going to need it. It's all of those really awesome outfits from like 1983 that you don't fit into anymore. You know, those are the data points that are kind of living in your proverbial closet within the organization. Holding onto that stuff has become not just an efficiency risk, not just a cost risk, but also legal risk. You know, as you see, more and more regulation of data, things like the GDPR. Or you know the CCPA in California. Data minimization has become extremely important. And I think that's even become more important now with AI. You have this exponential growth of data volumes and complexity. And it's really incumbent on organizations to proactively manage ROT data...

There is a lot of enthusiasm around new and budding roles in Legal Data Intelligence. I know there are a few job descriptions that have already been drafted on the LDI website. Could you add more color to how these new roles might emerge?

I think a lot of us had similar opportunities where we were brought in on different kinds of projects to consult on. Maybe we were the discovery counsel or the discovery attorney. We were brought in to consult with compliance, or contract life cycle management. That's legal technology. And that's information. And you're storing documents. And you're using automation and populating documents. I think one of my favorite emerging areas of legal technology and use cases is the Business of Law. Right now, we have use cases for invoice review and operational efficiency. But I'm excited about that one, because, you know, in my time at Boehringer Ingelheim, I was very much focused on creating a dashboard to track how efficient we were being in discovery. And I broke it down by the phases of the EDRM. How much data are we moving? How much data are we preserving, collecting, reviewing, producing? How much are we spending? How much are we paying outside counsel? How much are we spending internally? Trying to move all of that into some type of automated dashboarding that allows us to have some transparency with our data... Our job is to control legal risk and spend. That's the way I look at it, at least...I can imagine us building out additional use cases around AI and something like AI governance...I think there are a lot of different opportunities out there.

I don't think there's a better time if you were starting your legal career or rebooting it. You couldn't be in a better place at a better time, could you?

I'm a very, very lucky person. I've worked with very smart discovery partners at large law firms. And now I'm working at one of the leading innovators for AI in the world and it's extremely exciting. I think you don't have to work at Google or Microsoft to be excited, though. The opportunities are there, the opportunity to blaze your own trail. Organizations need legal data expertise. I also think you're going to see kind of this AI epoch. One of the interesting things about large language models is that we can't really explain what’s going on in the black box the way we could with TAR. But you now have algorithms that are creating their own algorithms that are creating their own algorithms. So you can't look at this as something that is going to be, you know, a perfectly baked model for any individual use case that is static that you can completely rely on. I think if you just kind of embrace the new dynamic world that we're living in and just accept the fact that things are going to change then it can be very exciting to be challenged all the time, because your skill set will allow you to get to the place where you know you'll be of value to your organization and ultimately to yourself.

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