eDiscovery Leaders Live: Doug Kaminski of Cobra Legal Solutions
Doug Kaminski, Chief Revenue Officer at Cobra Legal Solutions, joins George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, for ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive.
With over 20 years of experience in the legal industry spanning four continents, Doug specializes in helping organizations of all types and sizes understand and implement better processes along with technologies to simplify complex legal workflows. A frequent speaker and published author, Doug brings deep experience in the legal technology and services industry, having held leadership positions at Relativity, Symantec, Clearwell Systems, and Huron Consulting Group (now Consilio). Doug is a member of the Chicago Bar Association, the Detroit Bar Association, on the Global Advisory Council for the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, the IGRM Revision Committee, and a Fellow of the Claims & Litigation Management Alliance.
After sharing what brought him to the world of eDiscovery and then to Cobra Legal Solutions, Doug talked about his role at Cobra and some of the initiatives they are pursuing such as offering factional expertise. Doug then pivoted to artificial intelligence. He discussed the growing use of AI, the value to be had from using it, and the benefits of harnessing rather than letting it control you. Doug examined three sets of AI capabilities – roundabout writing style, sentiment analysis, and AI models. He looked at how these and other AI tools can be used for specific purposes such as DSARs. He then talked about AI adoption levels and ways to foster that adoption. Finally, Doug invited anyone in the Dallas aware to attend the upcoming BakerHostetler AI lunch-and-learn on June 9.
Key Highlights
- [2:46] What brought Doug to the world of electronic discovery.
- [4:26] How Doug ended up at Cobra.
- [6:34] Doug’s role at Cobra: Supporting factional expertise, seconding expertise, and a tech-prescriptive approach.
- [8:29] Fractional expertise explained and explored.
- [10:22] The growing use of AI: Finding new ways to achieve old objectives.
- [11:53] Not bowing to our robot overlords: Harnessing AI to create better outcomes.
- [12:51] AI explained: Roundabout writing style.
- [14:43] AI explained: Sentiment analysis.
- [15:51] AI explained: AI models.
- [17:53] Using AI for digital subject access requests (DSARs).
- [20:17] AI adoption levels.
- [22:48] How to foster adoption of AI.
- [26:55] Upcoming events: BakerHostetler Lunch and learn on the risks and rewards of AI in the legal profession.
Key Quotes by Doug Kaminski
- “What I’ve been seeing as the trend truly is a much greater use of the tools and AI in particular. We’re seeing that far more commonly and not just adopting it for the sake of adopting it.”
- “We’re trying to break habits and break inertia, and let’s face it, key words are just inertia. We can get well beyond this…. Am I getting value out of these actions or should we be doing something different?”
- “Roundabout writing is helpful because when someone is lying, for example, they tend to use an entirely different tone. It becomes much more professional. They will use different words. They’ll definitely become more verbose…. It’s a variation of their standard pattern and that’s what [roundabout style] is very helpful in finding.”
- “I think the best way to think of AI models are just recipes. You have particular outcomes you are looking for…. The computer can be trained well beyond keywords, obviously, using the various components of an AI model to be able to be able to see.”
- “What I like particularly about Reveal AI is it allows you to stack. You’ve got a lot of prebuilt models and you can blend these, much like you blend ingredients to get a particular recipe, and then you can tweak those for your particular circumstance.”
- “We should optimize for the most expensive eyeballs, and even though that’s a bit tongue in cheek that’s truly what it is.”
- “Now we’ve gotten to the point where you can ease people into [AI] using, say, conceptual clustering to show ‘Here’s some keywords you hadn’t thought of. You can still do your keyword thing but here’s some you might not have thought of before’ and then they start seeing that. I think honestly Brainspace has done a lot to push that needle forward.”