What It Takes to Be an LDI Practitioner: 3 Insights From 3 Industry Insiders

As the Legal Data Intelligence (LDI) model gains traction across the industry, organizations are increasingly seeking to understand the skills, attributes, and experience required to implement it. In fact, Thomson Reuters profiled two LDI founding members in a recent article: Adam Rouse, Senior Counsel and Director of eDiscovery Operations at Walgreens, who recently added two LDI analysts to his team; and Kelly Friedman, who was named the world’s first Chief Legal Data Intelligence Officer at Heuristica.

What makes a good LDI practitioner? To answer the question, we compiled some insights on the topic from industry insiders. These insights, shared by Emma Young, Owen Bourke, and Stuart Hall, were drawn from a panel discussion titled “New Roles, Boundless Opportunities: How Legal Data Intelligence Skills Chart New Paths in Legal” at Relativity Fest Sydney earlier this year.

An Ability to Grasp Business Needs and Work Cross-Functionally

Emma Young, Regional Manager (APAC) of eDiscovery and Electronic Data Management, DLA Piper, compared LDI practitioners to air traffic controllers who can maintain clarity of thought and precision in action even as they navigate across different information silos. Young argued that generalists who can discern what is needed in a specific project and then assemble the right teams to meet those needs are inherently valuable to her team. She offered a telling anecdote to illustrate how legal professionals with LDI skills can be preferable to narrow specialists:

“I sent a forensic practitioner out to get a specific piece of data we thought we needed. We thought we gave him a good brief about what we were trying to achieve, but he came back with a full disk image of the server—four terabytes of data. I was just looking for a specific data niche—not 4TB of data that had all this data that had nothing to do with this specific project.”

Aptitude and Passion for Using Technology to Connect the Dots

Stuart Hall, Principal of Discovery and Data Insights, Control Risks, believes that the attributes necessary to become an LDI practitioner go beyond practical skills or a specific professional background. For instance, Hall does not believe an eDiscovery background is essential. “I don’t think there is an ideal DNA for it. I think they naturally have an inquisitive mind, an aptitude for solving problems, and a passion for using the best available technology to connect the dots across a whole range of disparate data sets. I don’t think that these are skills necessarily because skills can be taught. I think these are aptitudes and passions that they naturally have.”

Experience in Using AI Defensibly and Effectively

Owen Bourke, Partner, Clayton Utz, who specializes in complex forensic technology work, brought up AI fluency as a key attribute to succeeding as an LDI practitioner. “Making determinations about what the best model is. How it’s deployed, how it’s validated, how it’s grounded, what sort of statistical measures you are bringing to the table as part of your validation—concepts like precision and recall and being able to articulate that. Ultimately AI is another tool in the toolkit, and you need to be able to use it in concert with all of the other tools at our disposal to pull it all together.”