Webinar Recap: Turn Your Discovery Skills into a Strategic Asset with LDI

Author: LDI Team

December 17, 2024

At a recent event organized by the ACEDs Philadelphia Chapter, founding members of the Legal Data Intelligence (LDI) project discussed the challenges and opportunities for legal professionals with a background in discovery and data management. Founding members Ashley Christakis (Senior Manager, eDiscovery & Legal Ops, CrowdStrike) and Scott Milner (Partner and Global Practice Group Leader of eData Practice Group, Morgan Lewis) joined Vince Catanzaro (Senior Counsel, FedEx) and Moderator Chris Orrin (eDiscovery Counsel, Klehr Harrison) on stage to share their thought-provoking insights and observations.

Titled “Legal Data Intelligence: Turning Your Discovery Skills into a Strategic Asset,” the session was organized to help discovery professionals view their data-oriented skills, technical competency, and knowledge of the law through a wider aperture—beyond the traditional boundaries of discovery.

We’ve summarized key points from the discussion below.

LDI Case Study: Overseeing a Massive Divestiture

As an example of how LDI practitioners can apply their multifaceted skill sets to a variety of use cases, Christakis presented a case study in which she oversaw a divestiture involving a major company.

Around 10 years ago, Christakis’ client, a major healthcare company, was selling one of its business units to another company. In this particular case, the acquiring company was also inheriting litigation matters involving the business unit being divested.

At the heart of this project was a legal data challenge that was both daunting and complex. Essentially, Christakis’ client wanted to ensure the data of employees who were being transitioned into the acquiring company was being properly managed. It was a three-pronged challenge:

The data of transitioning employees who were subject to legal hold for litigation matters related to the business unit had to be retained and transferred to the acquiring company.
The acquiring company followed a less conservative data retention policy than the healthcare company. Christakis’ team needed to fully understand and ensure compliance with the finer details of this new retention policy.
The data of transitioning employees under legal hold for litigation matters that didn’t involve the business unit also had to be retained, as it remained relevant to the healthcare company.

What complicated the challenge further was the scale of the divestiture, which affected thousands of employees; the data profile was voluminous—close to 72TB. Further, as divestitures tend to be very time-sensitive, the entire project had to be successfully executed in a tight two-month timeframe.

“I had to gather the troops; I had to hire the people, I had to find the lists, I had to make sure that all the data was there,” Christakis said.

What compounded the data analysis was the changing nature of the divestiture agreement. As Christakis explained, “It was a moving target. The underlying agreement was changing constantly; the list of people who were being transitioned to the acquiring company was changing every day.”

Ultimately, Christakis and her team found an optimal approach to solving the legal data challenge. “We decided to take proportionality into play. We were not going to be able to collect the hard drives of thousands of employees in two months. Instead, we identified the top 10 custodians. This is where my discovery skill set came into play: Hiring an ediscovery vendor and making sure that we were able to image 200 laptops and some other custodial data sources within the company.”

The Importance of Being Curious

One recurring theme in the webinar was the impact of AI on discovery roles and the legal industry at large. The panelists agreed that the need of the hour was actively learning and engaging with AI models instead of taking a fatalistic view of AI’s impact. The expression, “AI is not going to replace lawyers, lawyers who know how to use AI will replace those who don’t” was invoked during the discussion.

The focus, the panelists argued, should be on the net-new opportunities that increasing adoption of AI would usher in. The legal skills that could be at a premium at a time when AI models can review data, summarize it, answer questions, and translate language with increasing levels of accuracy would be inevitably different than the skills that were prized in earlier times.

Milner emphasized the importance of having a curiosity mindset around AI. “I've been looking at older cases after getting client approval to see how we would do things differently with AI, and I’m sharing the results with the client.”

He also illustrated the importance of being an early adopter, bringing up an example from his earlier days in ediscovery. “We’ve been doing managed review for 20 years. And we had an unbelievable group of associates who were great at linear review. But when we started doing traditional AI review with concept clustering, threading, and TAR, some of those associates did not want to learn these new methodologies. They were some of our best associates and then they were no longer working with us or our clients.”

Crystallizing How Discovery Adds Value

A common theme in the webinar was how the Legal Data Intelligence model played a strategic role in conveying the varied and multi-faceted nature of the vital work that discovery professionals performed.

Catanzaro reflected on his own layered and complex set of skills and experiences to talk about the relationship between LDI and discovery: “We ended up in this field because we are not afraid of technology. You can’t say the same for everyone in the legal profession. For those of us who do this on a regular basis, technology is what we do. We are all LDI practitioners whether we use the term or not. I used to work at an organization where there was a lot of M&A. So, there were divestitures and acquisitions; these things are extremely data intensive. Where does all that data come from, who are you going to ask for help with it? The answer is people like us who deal with data every day. Defining what each of those use cases are, like LDI has tried to accomplish here, gives us and our colleagues outside discovery a better sense of everything that we can do.”

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

Editor’s Note: During the webinar, Milner shared his LDI case study on how he helped a client recapture missing revenue by identifying and enforcing price escalation clauses across a large body of contracts. We have already covered Milner’s LDI case study in detail in a previous blog post. You can read his story here.