A recent session at the ELM Amplify 2025 user conference, titled "Let the SUN Shine: Unlocking Legal Data for Smarter Operations," focused on empowering legal teams with actionable insights to enhance efficiency, demonstrate value, and align with broader business objectives. The panel driving this session, featuring industry veterans from two global financial institutions and one global health care company, all in the Fortune 500, emphasized that data is now the core of strategic legal operations.
How do you distinguish valuable from useless data?
A central theme for managing legal data is distinguishing valuable information from digital noise using the “ROT vs. SUN” framework. This approach is a cornerstone of the Legal Data Intelligence (LDI) initiative, a global movement started in 2024 to help legal teams transform data into actionable intelligence.
- ROT stands for Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial data. This is the vast amount of information that clutters systems, slows down processes, and offers minimal strategic value. It is the noise that obscures true insight.
- SUN represents data that is Sensitive, Useful, and Necessary. This is the clean, structured, and relevant information that empowers legal teams to make informed decisions, manage risk, and drive business outcomes.
Filtering out ROT to focus on SUN is the essential first step toward smarter legal operations and is a core principle of Legal Data Intelligence (LDI).
What are the key challenges in legal data management?
The journey toward a data-driven legal department is not without its obstacles. The panelists identified several common challenges organizations face when managing their legal data.
- Cultural shift: One of the most significant hurdles is cultural. As one of the panelist noted, it's a "massive transformation" to teach attorneys why data matters and how it can tell a compelling story.
- Data hygiene: Maintaining clean, structured, and reliable data is crucial. Another panelist shared her experience of inheriting a "dirty" database, highlighting how poor data hygiene can skew reports and render analytics useless.
- Data access and collaboration: Data is often siloed in different systems and geographic locations, making it difficult to create a unified, analyzable view.
- Technology adoption: For highly regulated industries like banking, adopting new technology requires balancing innovation with risk management, which can slow down progress.
What lessons can be learned from industry experts?
Each panelist shared unique experiences that provided practical context for addressing these challenges in legal data management.
One financial industry panelist’s team hired its first data analyst last year, laying the groundwork for data-backed decision-making in firm selection and pricing. Her advice is to work backward: start with the decisions you need to make, identify the necessary questions, and then locate the legal data required to answer them.
Operating within a large, global institution, our other finance industry panelist’s team must comply with strict enterprise data office standards. Their legal management platform, Passport, is classified as "restricted" due to the sensitive information it holds. Managing data across over 70 countries requires meticulous hygiene, and AI is seen as a future enabler to manage this complexity.
After a company spin-off, the panelist from the health care industry inherited a "dirty" database from a "lift-and-shift" migration that lacked proper data structuring. Her multi-year journey to clean the database underscores a critical lesson: never migrate data without first establishing what portion of the data is truly valuable and then design the right structure for what remains.
What practical strategies can help unlock legal data?
The panel offered several actionable strategies for legal operations professionals looking to harness the power of their data:
- Build a trustworthy data foundation: Clean, structured data is non-negotiable. Without it, any analytics or AI initiative is destined to fail.
- Automate wherever possible: Minimize manual data entry to improve accuracy and consistency. The panelists strongly advised against using open text fields, a primary source of "dirty" data.
- Collect only what’s necessary: Avoid the temptation to collect every possible data point. A lean, focused data collection strategy is more sustainable and yields better results.
The path to data-driven legal operations is a challenging but essential enterprise. By embracing frameworks like ROT vs. SUN and the guidance of the Legal Data Intelligence community, legal departments can unlock new levels of efficiency and strategic value.
