A panel at CLOC yesterday unveiled a promising new and comprehensive model for legal data challenges: Legal Data Intelligence!

The panelists were Omar Haroun, Founder & CEO at Cicero, Farrah Pepper, Chief Legal Innovation Counsel at Marsh McLennan, Ashley Christakis, Senior Manager eDiscovery and Legal Operations at CrowdStrike and Jeremiah Weasenforth, AGC- Legal Analytics Director at Edward Jones. They are part of a group of around 20 legal leaders from law firms, in-house teams, and legal service providers that came together to design a novel approach to solving legal data challenges.

The result – 18 months in the making – is Legal Data Intelligence (LDI). The unveiling included the release of a new website with more information and tons of resources about the new initiative.

The LDI team has defined twelve use cases so far with a detailed list of custom steps for each to complete the task. The steps are grouped into three categories – Initiate, Investigate, and Implement – and include best practices and guidance based on practitioners’ experience with these types of projects. Here are the use cases, grouped into related disciplines:

Disputes & Investigations

• Litigation
• Regulatory Requests
• Third-Party Subpoenas
• Internal Investigations

Corporate

• Contract Reviews
• Contract Lifecycle Management

Data Protection Compliance

• Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Requests
• Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs)
• Data Breach Response
• Personal Data Identification and Anonymization

Business of Law

• Invoice Review
• Operational Efficiency

Here’s an example of the steps for Litigation, downloaded as a PDF:

The goals of the new LDI model include reducing siloing of data within organizations and providing a common vocabulary and framework for legal data challenges. To that end, the LDI team has defined a counterpart to the “bad” data within organizations (i.e., Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial – ROT data) with an acronym for “good” data – Sensitive, Useful and Necessary (SUN) data. Let the SUN shine!

As the panel noted yesterday, LDI isn’t designed to replace other models like EDRM or the CLOC Core 12, but rather to complement them.

The LDI team even envisions new types of roles related to the discipline, like Head of Legal Data Intelligence and Legal Data Intelligence Analyst – the links are to sample job descriptions for each. Those sample job descriptions are among several additional resources provided on the site, which includes a nine-page white paper that goes more in-depth into the LDI initiative, including the reasons why the initiative was created, details of the LDI model and how you can join the dialogue – which includes joining the official LDI group on LinkedIn or emailing the team at info@legaldataintelligence.org. Perhaps you’re aware of other legal data use cases which aren’t yet represented; if so, feel free to suggest them!

I like what I see so far about the initiative. It focuses on the key challenge – data – that spans so many legal use cases – most of which, in turn, have an impact throughout the organization, not just in the legal department. Many of these use cases have become use cases for eDiscovery. It still rankles me when people use the terms “litigation” and “eDiscovery” interchangeably, as litigation is only one of many use cases for eDiscovery. So, I also like the application of data intelligence best practices to a variety of use cases.

The LDI initiative shows a lot of promise for revolutionizing how legal professionals address the challenges they face in getting their jobs done and it has been developed by a team of forward-thinking legal thought leaders that represent a lot of knowledge and experience in our industry. Check out the LDI site here and consider getting involved!

So, what do you think? Do you think the LDI model and initiative could revolutionize how legal tasks are handled? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.