THE INFRASTRUCTURE LAYER OF THE BUSINESS OF LAW WITH TOM BALDWIN

Hosted by David Cowen | Careers and the Business of Law Everyone's talking about Harvey, Legora, Spellbook, and Ivo. Nobody's talking about what they ride on top of. Tom Baldwin - founder and CEO of Entegrata, former CIO at Foley, Sheppard Mullin, Reed Smith, and Cadwalader - argues the real story is data infrastructure. Without a single source of truth, every AI tool in your firm is working from a partial picture. WHY THIS MATTERS? If your firm is buying AI tools without auditing the data underneath them, this is your warning shot. Tom's framing: toaster ovens need an electrical grid. KEY TAKEAWAYS AI tools work on narrow tasks, not whole-firm intelligence. 50 asset purchase agreements? Great. 200 million documents? No. Pulling documents out of your DMS strips away the metadata that makes them valuable - judge, opposing counsel, area of law, industry. That context is what AI actually needs. Business-of-law use cases (lateral prediction, cross-sell, client attrition, FP&A) are wide open. Practice of law got all the attention. A data lakehouse unifies data across 20-40 systems. Snowflake popularized it; Azure/Databricks/Fabric are the modern stacks.  Cost is roughly the same at 200 lawyers or 2,000 - six figures, ongoing. Compute and storage are cheap; talent is the investment. Firms move from "nice to have" to "must have" after a near-miss. Tom's example: a firm almost fired an associate because their FTE calc didn't account for maternity leave. The chief data officer is becoming a real C-suite role. Sidley's among the early movers. Watch the forward-deployed legal engineer trend. Harvey is hiring practitioners for these roles. PEOPLE MENTIONED David Cowen - Host Tom Baldwin - Entegrata founder & CEO Andrew Sieja- Founder of kCura/Relativity; Entegrata's first angel investor Renee Morris, Katrina Dittmer, Glenn LaForce - Data leaders Tom mentioned COMPANIES AND TOOLS MENTIONED Entegrata - Turnkey data lakehouse in Azure Snowflake, Azure, Databricks, Microsoft Fabric - Data platform stacks Harvey, Legora, Spellbook, Ivo - Practice-of-law AI tools Sidley Austin - Early adopter of the chief data officer role 🎧 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Share this episode and take your career from now to next! 💡To learn more about the future of legal innovation, visit https://solid.legal/podcasts/ Never eat alone!