THE INFRASTRUCTURE LAYER OF THE BUSINESS OF LAW WITH TOM BALDWIN

May 19, 2026

Hosted by David Cowen | Careers and the Business of Law

Everyone's talking about Harvey, Legora, Spellbook, and Ivo. Nobody's talking about what they ride on top of. Tom Baldwin - founder and CEO of Entegrata, former CIO at Foley, Sheppard Mullin, Reed Smith, and Cadwalader - argues the real story is data infrastructure. Without a single source of truth, every AI tool in your firm is working from a partial picture.

WHY THIS MATTERS?
If your firm is buying AI tools without auditing the data underneath them, this is your warning shot. Tom's framing: toaster ovens need an electrical grid.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• AI tools work on narrow tasks, not whole-firm intelligence. 50 asset purchase agreements? Great. 200 million documents? No.
• Pulling documents out of your DMS strips away the metadata that makes them valuable - judge, opposing counsel, area of law, industry. That context is what AI actually needs.
• Business-of-law use cases (lateral prediction, cross-sell, client attrition, FP&A) are wide open. Practice of law got all the attention.
• A data lakehouse unifies data across 20-40 systems. Snowflake popularized it; Azure/Databricks/Fabric are the modern stacks. 
• Cost is roughly the same at 200 lawyers or 2,000 - six figures, ongoing. Compute and storage are cheap; talent is the investment.
• Firms move from "nice to have" to "must have" after a near-miss. Tom's example: a firm almost fired an associate because their FTE calc didn't account for maternity leave.
• The chief data officer is becoming a real C-suite role. Sidley's among the early movers.
• Watch the forward-deployed legal engineer trend. Harvey is hiring practitioners for these roles.
  
  

PEOPLE MENTIONED

• David Cowen - Host
• Tom Baldwin - Entegrata founder & CEO
• Andrew Sieja- Founder of kCura/Relativity; Entegrata's first angel investor
• Renee Morris, Katrina Dittmer, Glenn LaForce - Data leaders Tom mentioned

COMPANIES AND TOOLS MENTIONED

• Entegrata - Turnkey data lakehouse in Azure
• Snowflake, Azure, Databricks, Microsoft Fabric - Data platform stacks
• Harvey, Legora, Spellbook, Ivo - Practice-of-law AI tools
• Sidley Austin - Early adopter of the chief data officer role

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