Warm Data – how legal firms are starting to leverage it

Written by Jackie 'O’Dowd

Data, information and analytics is considered a business-as-usual activity by most legal firms. But in fact, it is the complete opposite. Increasingly, legal firms are starting to see how other sectors such as Construction, Health and Manufacturing are leveraging data and especially warm data.

We see most legal firms assessing the benefits technologies such as Artificial Intelligence can deliver, and there is no doubt AI will deliver specific capabilities, but they are missing the warm data thread. This is a lesson that can be learned from other sectors.

Warm data is a specific kind of data, it is information about interrelationships. The term warm data was first used by Nora Bateson several years ago to describe interrelationality. Warm data captures the qualitative dynamics offering another dimension of understanding and insight from what otherwise can be a business-as-usual e-discovery.

Relationships can be complex or simple, isolated or part of a complex interweave. When we can see them, observe them, and navigate them we can start to make-sense of them, to better understand the depth, breadth, and reach.

An interesting use of warm data is the visualisation of the recently released Epstein case papers. This exercise was initially done for fun and interest, since then it has become a good training tool.

When the data is visualised, we can start to determine patterns and linkages. We can see how simple text-based data can be easily converted to warm data – relationship data. We see relationships between organisations, people and events. We form observations. We see things that are not easily seen or can be overlooked by simply pulling or chunking text from a document or series of documents.

Warm data visualised and in context is powerful.