eDiscovery Leaders Live: Chip Delany of Lineal
Chip Delany, Strategy Director at Lineal, joins George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, as part of a special ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive series broadcast from ILTACON 2022.
Chip Delany is the Strategy Director at Lineal. His primary expertise is in two areas. The first area is comprehensive integrated forensics, eDiscovery, and document review services for complex legal matters. The second area is AI modeling to understand unstructured data, both at the corporate and the law firm level. Born in Australia, in March of this year Chip became an American citizen (congratulations!). He likes American’s national parks, but remains loyal to Australia’s Rugby Union team, The Wallabies.
Chip joined us at the gazebo on day two of ILTACON and focused on four broad topics. He started by exploring legal innovation: what it looks like, how to succeed at it, and how it will help all of us. He talked about the ever-changing challenges posed by unstructured data, including the data from chat apps. He discussed the value of education, both to develop the next generation of eDiscovery personnel and to advance the industry as a whole. Chip shared his thoughts on how to succeed at sales, and then closed with reflections on ILTACON 2022.
Key Highlights
- [3:52] Growth in legal innovation at law firms – moving past the basics to more creative approaches.
- [5:44] How to success at legal innovation.
- [7:12] Where legal innovation might be ten years from now – and what it will take to get there.
- [8:00] Legal innovation expanding beyond discovery – and bringing opportunity with it.
- [8:40] The ongoing challenge of unstructured data and the need for a really good way to understand data.
- [10:07] What successful innovation looks like.
- [12:31] The importance of finding folks with the right appetite, imagination, and grit.
- [13:51] Stomaching failure positively – a personal journey.
- [15:20] Why the legal community should support bold ideas and brave efforts.
- [16:47] How to help the next generation develop and succeed.
- [18:39] Why education is paramount.
- [19:39] How to communicate the end value of eDiscovery education.
- [21:57] Learning to sell though education, empathy, and listening.
- [25:27] Final thoughts on ILTACON 2022.
Key Quotes
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- “If they are going to succeed [at legal innovation], then service providers and technology companies need to identify people going into these roles and encourage and support them.”
- “As we start to actually implement these ideas that we’re having of using AI or applying legal services in nontraditional ways and they become something which can be repeated and become a real service line, you’ve built that with that group or that person and then you can grow that into something much bigger.”
- “About 90% of business struggle with unstructured data, have no real plan and understanding of how to really manage and deal with it…. One of the big challenges is the explosion of all sorts of different sources of unstructured data from chat apps. WhatsApp is an example. They produce on a day on average about 2 billion messages around the world in 160 countries in about 80 different languages.”
- “You need a really good way to understand data. You need a much better way to be able to quickly get through it and identify points of value. A point of value can be something that makes money for the business but it also can be something that eliminates risk.”
- “[Innovation looks] like dating and establishing trust and asking for someone’s hand in marriage…. You have to be honest in terms of what the technology that you have can actually do. You can’t promise the world. You have to be patient and identify what it is that they’re trying to achieve.”