Revolutionizing the Practice of Law Through Data Science:
                        Use Case and Applications
                                                 Bennett Borden
                                           Drinker, Biddle & Reath LLP
                                               1500 K Street, N.W.
                                           Washington, DC USA 20005
                                            Bennett.Borden@dbr.com



ABSTRACT                                                       Bennett B. Borden is Partner and Co-chair of
As demonstrated at past DESI workshops at ICAIL,               Drinker Biddle & Reath’s Information Governance
advances over the past decade in artificial intelligence       and eDiscovery Practice, as well as the firm’s Chief
and machine learning have transformed the practice of          Data Scientist. In his two decades of legal practice, he
e-discovery in making legal search more cost-                  has conducted both offensive and defensive electronic
effective and efficient. Similar forms of data analytics       discovery in complex litigation. Bennett has had
now hold the promise of similarly aiding the legal             extensive experience counseling Fortune 500 clients
profession across a spectrum of traditional activities,        on the establishment of information governance and
many of which consist of highly repetitive tasks. Law          records management policies. He regularly advises
firms are not, however, incentivized to be more                multinational clients regarding data privacy, security
efficient if they are simply giving away the efficiency        and regulatory compliance. In his role as the firm’s
gains without reaping a benefit for themselves. In             Chief Data Scientist, he is responsible for the firm’s
order to effectively apply data science to the practice        overall data analytics strategy. Bennett advises the
of law, a new billing mechanism needs to be applied            firm and its clients on the development and use of
so that the efficiency gains benefit both the client and       analytics models that enable insight, data storytelling
the firm, aligning their incentives. In this session, we       and economic value generation. Bennett’s research
will discuss how data analytics principles can best be         into the use of machine-based learning and
applied to the practice of law, with an eye towards            unstructured data for organizational insight is now
how AI methods are being used within law firms to              being put to work in data-driven early warning
complement human legal expertise. Illustrative use             systems for clients to detect and prevent corporate
cases will include using AI in contract analysis,              fraud and other misconduct. Bennett also builds
mergers & acquisitions, and employment and                     machine-based learning models to transform and
whistleblower investigations.                                  improve legal outcomes in key corporate events
                                                               including mergers and acquisitions, information
                                                               governance program development and enforcement,
                                                               litigation, and investigations and business
                                                               intelligence. He has been Chambers-ranked
                                                               nationwide in e-discovery for the past four years, and
In: Proceedings of the First International Workshop            recently was appointed to the National Conference of
on AI and Intelligent Assistance for Legal                     Lawyers and Scientists (NCLS) of the American
Professionals in the Digital Workplace (LegalAIIA              Academy for the Advancement of Science.
2019), held in conjunction with ICAIL 2019. June
17, 2019. Montréal, QC, Canada.                            §   Bennett holds an M.S. in Business Analytics from
                                                               New York University, a J.D., cum laude, from
Copyright © 2019 for this paper by its authors. Use            Georgetown University Law Center, and a B.A. with
permitted under Creative Commons License                       highest honors from George Mason University. He is
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY                           a member of the Bars of the District of Columbia and
4.0). Published at http://ceur-ws.org.                         Maryland.