Webinar Recap: Changing the Paradigm with Legal Data Intelligence

Author: LDI Team

November 25, 2024

On a recent webinar moderated by David Cowen, founding members of the Legal Data Intelligence (LDI) project shared vital insights and observations on the complexity of data challenges today, and the exciting opportunities available to legal professionals working at the intersection of data, technology, and the law. Titled A Novel Approach to Data Challenges: Changing the Paradigm with Legal Data Intelligence, the webinar featured a panel of three founding members: Bobby Malhotra (Litigation Partner at Winston & Strawn), Kelly Friedman (Chief Legal Data Intelligence Officer and Senior Counsel at Heuristica), and Jeremiah Weasenforth (Legal Analytics Director, Edward Jones).

Some of the most teachable moments in the webinar were when the three panelists gave attendees a deep dive into their LDI case studies, demonstrating how they successfully navigated novel legal data challenges.

Here’s a brief snapshot of their LDI case studies:

Time-Sensitive Divestiture: Building an AI Model to Identify Confidential Data

One of Malhotra’s clients, a multi-billion-dollar company, was divesting a part of its business. As part of the divestiture, the divesting company had to hand over relevant data to the acquiring company. Malhotra was charged with preventing the exposure of third-party confidential data lying in the data pool of the business that was being divested. To that end, he had to filter out any and all third-party confidential data from the data transfer between the two companies. This posed some complex challenges:

It had to be done in three months; any delays could potentially scuttle the deal.
There was no standard workflow to analyze documents for third-party confidentiality and prohibit their transfer. Malhotra therefore had to devise an entirely new workflow.

“So, we put our heads together,” Malhotra said.

He worked with the client, engineers, and technology partners to build a custom AI model and workflow from scratch. This model, trained to identify, flag, and block third-party confidential information, analyzed tens of millions of documents efficiently over the course of just a few months, helping the transaction proceed on time and under budget.

Malhotra stressed that his approach to handling massive amounts of data—though novel—leaned on skills and tools he already had. There was no reinvention of the wheel here.

“Not having to start from ground zero every time is really important; it’s one of the reasons I am all in on LDI and became one of the founding members,” he said.

The “Level of Effort Metric”: Predicting a Contract’s Time to Close & Its Impact on Business Value

Jeremiah Weasenforth, legal analytics director at Edward Jones and LDI founding member, shared how his career has dramatically evolved with the industry: “Five years ago, 85 percent of my work was pure ediscovery. Today, that’s maybe five percent of my work.”

Of late, Weasenforth finds himself offering his Legal Data Intelligence perspective across a diverse range of legal matters: from negotiating contracts and advising on regulatory complaints to dealing with intellectual property issues and making efficiency improvements in the business of law.

Weasenforth’s work in contract negotiations, in particular, is an illustrative example of Legal Data Intelligence in action. When his client was struggling to understand why certain contracts were taking longer to close, Weasenforth decided to create a new metric that could predictively answer how long it would take to successfully negotiate a contract and the impact of the negotiation on the business value.

“We call it the level of effort metric, which basically predicts, for example, that it’s going to take a month-and-a-half to close the contract and that it might take six to seven turns, etc.,” he said.

At the time, there was no mechanism to capture the data needed to deliver this metric.
The existing Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) tool could only populate basic fields. It could not capture historical data on factors such as number of turns, the other side’s paper, and the amount of human effort needed for each turn.
Weasenforth had to build a new process to identify the data needed to determine a contract’s time-to-close and its impact on business value.

To understand the human effort behind this problem, Weasenforth built new fields into the CLM, looked at historical information, and captured turns over time. Armed with this additional data, he and his team were able to leverage this new metric.

Thanks to these efforts, Weasenforth’s client can now predict the rough timing for difficult provision redlines or in complex situations where the contract is on the other side’s paper. They have since seen multiple deals close faster than the average time to close metric because they automatically used a fallback provision instead of spending months in negotiations.

Advice for Future LDI Practitioners

Toward the end of the webinar, Cowen asked the panel of LDI leaders how other legal professionals use Legal Data Intelligence as a catalyst in their current roles, and how they created the boundary conditions for breakthroughs in their own careers. The panelists shared a broad range of observations and insights; here’s a list of the most salient ones:

Follow Your Interests

Kelly Friedman recalled her former life as a litigation partner: “Even when I was buried in paper, I was interested in the data.” The emergence of data privacy as a new discipline pulled Friedman closer towards the realm of privacy law. Subsequently, as data breaches became more frequent, she pivoted to cybersecurity. Essentially, her career journey has been guided by curiosity and a willingness to go all in on becoming an expert in any new interest she embarks upon.

Take Risks

Weasenforth expounded on the importance of taking the risk to step outside one’s comfort zone and finding solutions to hard problems. “You have to think, ‘what are the types of problems that I tend to see or solve?’ Get to know these other groups. Figure out their biggest headaches or pain points and think about how you can use data intelligence to solve their challenges. My guess is you’ll find some efficiencies, some really low-hanging fruit, in almost every group that you touch base with.”

Step Outside Your Comfort Zone

Bobby Malhotra believes that the skillset of an ediscovery professional readily ports itself over to other fields, whether ediscovery, data privacy, AI, M&A, or elsewhere. “All of those fields are facing data challenges.” He noted that the career he embarked on 17 or 18 years ago isn’t the same today. It’s changed dramatically—a growth he attributed to his willingness to think outside the box. “Obviously it requires hard work, it requires retuning in terms of your skill set, but a lot of the fundamentals apply and cross over in these data challenges.”

To learn about the Legal Data Intelligence project, check out our online resources and social channels:

Editor’s Note: During the webinar, Friedman shared her LDI case study on how she strategized and executed a data breach response strategy for a major school board in Canada. We have already covered Friedman’s LDI case study in detail in our previous blog post. You can read her story here.