Business & Corporate
Mine the Data Buried in Your Computers
Kenneth A. Grady
Lawyers have used mental rules – heuristics – to answer client questions, such as, “Is that term market?” But today, lawyers have much more accurate tools they can use to answer client questions. To use them they need access to 21st-century gold – the data in documents. Locked in file cabinets and computers are documents that are more than simple text. They contain the stories of legal matters and their outcomes. While the documents themselves live on, the stories within them fade over time. Lawyers end up relying on tribal folklore – stories passed from lawyer to lawyer – instead of hard facts. To compete effectively, lawyers must create, use, and store documents so that the data within them can be accessed, allowing lawyers to rely on facts rather than heuristics.