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Overruled by Data is the podcast for law firms looking to accelerate their data journey without all the pain points.
Hosted by Tom Baldwin and brought to you by Entegrata, each episode shares real-world stories from law firm leaders who’ve tackled the tough stuff—getting data from all the right places, navigating the AI hype, and scaling operations in a way that doesn’t leave you with a mountain of tech debt.
If you're in a leadership role at a law firm, this show offers valuable insights from those who've been there, sharing what works and what to avoid on your data-driven journey.
[00:00:00] Rachel Shields Williams: If you chase perfection, you'll never get progress. Progress is incremental. By the time you reach perfection, it's outdated. It's not relevant to you anymore. And if you're constantly chasing perfection, you're constantly changing the goalpost on yourself.
[00:00:16] Tom Baldwin: My name's Tom Baldwin. This is Overruled by Data, the podcast for law firms looking to start their data journey or accelerate the journey they're already on.
[00:00:24] Tom Baldwin: Brought to you by Entegrata. All right. Welcome back to another episode of Overruled by Data. Today I am blessed to have a guest with us that's at the forefront of a powerful shift in big law, using data not only to manage knowledge, but to truly understand clients. Rachel Shields Williams is the director of Client Intelligence at Sidley, where she's redefining how law firms can use analytics and insights to deliver sharper.
[00:00:50] Tom Baldwin: More strategic service. Her past been, um, anything but conventional. She began in business development. She moved into knowledge management and now landed a role, uh, that connects the dots between people, process, and platforms, all in the name of better understanding clients, um, and outcomes. She's also the incoming president of the Legal Marketing Association and one of the most future focused voices in the industry.
[00:01:11] Tom Baldwin: Today we're digging into how Rachel sees data reshaping client relationships. What she's learned across disciplines and why getting started even imperfectly is the key to progress in legal innovation. Rachel, welcome to Overruled by Data.
[00:01:25] Rachel Shields Williams: Thank you so much. It's not very often that people say a blessing and talking to me in the same sentence, so I'm really flattered and excited to be here to talk with you today.
[00:01:35] Tom Baldwin: Yeah, it's gonna be an amazing journey. So speaking of journey, let's start with your background. Your career spans, business development, KM and now client intelligence. How would you describe the common thread or driving force behind those transitions?
[00:01:48] Rachel Shields Williams: I mean it, the perky part of me says helping people.
[00:01:54] Rachel Shields Williams: It's always been about helping lawyers work better. The more business side of me says, following the money. How do we help make more money? How do we become more profitable, more efficient? You know, we're not here to talk about the law firm economics, but that has always been a big driver in, uh, my career path as well.
[00:02:14] Tom Baldwin: And it's interesting because not a lot of folks have followed this career arc. What was your experience like when you moved from BD into the more technical, strategic, not that BD is not strategic, but what was that move like from the business side of law firms into, uh, these other roles?
[00:02:31] Rachel Shields Williams: It was actually really eye-opening, like my general attitude has always been the same.
[00:02:35] Rachel Shields Williams: Like I'm here to help people. I want people to work more efficiently, and what you do with that gained efficiency is up to you. Whether you wanna be able to coach your kids' little league game, spend more time with your clients or get that next matter. Whatever it is, like, you know, that's been the goal of it.
[00:02:51] Rachel Shields Williams: And it was really funny. My goal didn't change, but my title did and all of a sudden coming into knowledge management, people were much more apt to have me in the room, much more interested in, you know, hearing the same thoughts that I was saying in bd. And it's really funny. So now that I report to a Chief Data and AI officer, I am.
[00:03:11] Rachel Shields Williams: Today I was in the elevator and a summer introduced themselves to me and they're like, oh, what do you say you do here? And I was like, oh, I'm one of the directors in the, um, AI and data program. And I saw their little eyes laid up and I was just like, I'm literally doing the same job that I've been doing in some way, shape or form for the last 16 years.
[00:03:27] Rachel Shields Williams: Helping people, helping people work more efficiently. And that's been kind of the guiding process. And I think part of the reason that my career path has been a lot different than a lot of other people's. I'm not really fixated. On the job, I'm fixated on the work that I'm doing and do I have the resources to do what I want to do?
[00:03:47] Rachel Shields Williams: And resources can be firm investment, leadership support, supportive managers, having people working for me that help me bring these ideas to light. And I've kind of followed that versus like, oh, I wanna be a director of BD, or I wanna be a chief, you know, knowledge officer. I'm like, eh, can I do the cool work I wanna do?
[00:04:06] Tom Baldwin: That's awesome. Speaking of doing cool work, right? You, you actually grew up around a family run business, and I'm always interested in people's kind of origin story. Did that influence or kinda lead your approach to being innovative in any way in the roles you've been in?
[00:04:22] Rachel Shields Williams: Absolutely. Absolutely. I grew up on the ninth fairway, so when the sign said family owned and operated, we literally lived on the property and we were the operators of it and growing up.
[00:04:34] Rachel Shields Williams: With having my dad as my general manager for the first several years of my working career as a lifeguard, you know, I saw a lot of innovation and just kind of like, oh, we can't go out and buy something. We need to go fix it. Or, this broke and I don't know how to fix it. So let me order. I mean, I'm dating myself, but like, let me go order the manual.
[00:04:53] Rachel Shields Williams: Let me go look it up on how to fix things. But also in that. I learned a lot about customer service and helping people. Like when people come into the clubhouse after they've paid their greens fees and gotten their cart, they're not coming in because they wanna come inside, they're coming in 'cause they need something and maybe they're rushed, maybe they're harried, maybe they don't know what you offer compared to the club that they normally go to.
[00:05:18] Rachel Shields Williams: And so I got very familiar with trying to anticipate people's needs and you know, being comfortable with asking people when someone says, I want a drink. Okay. Do you want like an alcoholic or a non-alcoholic drink? Do you want Gatorade? Do you want soda? Do you just want a water? And now, if a regular came in and said, I want a drink, you know, it's Jimmy and it's three 30 on a Saturday, he wants a Coors Light.
[00:05:41] Rachel Shields Williams: But if I've never met Tom before, I need to ask a lot of questions. And I think that that created my service mindset. That has really served me well throughout my career of just. I just wanna help people and what people do with that help. You know, whether they, whatever they do with it, that's up to them.
[00:05:59] Rachel Shields Williams: But, you know, creating raving fans that want to come back as well has really helped my ability to grow within the same firm for, you know, over 16 years now.
[00:06:10] Tom Baldwin: Well, and okay. Speaking of that, that's a great transition. So you've been at the same firm for 16 years, yet you've been able to sort of almost redefine yourself more so than anybody I've ever seen at a firm with that kind of longevity.
[00:06:23] Tom Baldwin: And so you recent, you've, you've taken on this new role of director of client intelligence. And you mentioned earlier reporting into a newly fashioned role, a chief data and innovation officer. Tell me a little bit about that work, that role, and how does it differ from what you were doing? I know there's a lot of parallels and similarities, but how is it sort of narrowly focused and different than what you were doing before?
[00:06:43] Tom Baldwin: I.
[00:06:44] Rachel Shields Williams: I think what makes it different is it's actually bringing together both sides of the previous chapters of my career here in working in knowledge management and particularly working with experience management lawyers, were excited to be able to have access to this information. And you know, if you give a mouse a cookie, it's like, okay, well now I wanna see not only my documents, but I wanna see when was the last time I talked to this client and was this client invited to something?
[00:07:09] Rachel Shields Williams: And. And then, and then, and then, and at the underpinning of all of it is actually the organization of our data, you know, in order to display it. Like, you know, and from their perspective, we have the information, so why can't I have it in one portal? And you know, they don't really want to hear like, well, we have all these older systems and their taxonomies don't align and they're not updated, they don't have APIs.
[00:07:33] Rachel Shields Williams: Like, they don't wanna hear any of that. They just hear no. Right. And. This new role is helping, allowing me to help the firm to build our information infrastructure in a way that we can answer these questions, we can create these portals, we can allow the lawyer to go to one page and see client USA, or let me see what's going on with matter.
[00:07:58] Rachel Shields Williams: 1, 2, 3. And that's really cool because that is a common pain point that I have heard on both sides of the house and the importance of the client relationship. It's great to see law firms evolve and join other major businesses and focus on our clients and being able to organize that information in a way that it can be leveraged.
[00:08:19] Rachel Shields Williams: I don't know how everyone's gonna wanna leverage it, but I do know how to organize it in a way that we can repurpose it.
[00:08:25] Tom Baldwin: When you talked about sort of the differing systems and data inconsistencies, um, when was the first time that you had this sort of aha moment or epiphany where like, okay, data's kind of important and it maybe was born out of a pain point or some, you know, instance where you had to say no or you couldn't respond the way you wanted.
[00:08:44] Tom Baldwin: Where was that first time that you had that aha moment?
[00:08:47] Rachel Shields Williams: It was 2012, 2013, we had just opened the Houston market and this was like the time that Houston was booming. Mm. And this was like my first big responsibility as a BD manager. I was in charge of the Houston office during that time period. I think I helped onboard around 50 partners around the world that were somehow tangentially related to energy over the course of three years.
[00:09:13] Rachel Shields Williams: We had all of this legacy information. We were taking information from our project finance practice, our energy practice, our environmental practice. They were cross-selling government experience, and it was just this chaotic hot mess. And you know, as with many marketers, it was born out of trying to avoid the stick, not chasing the carrot.
[00:09:33] Rachel Shields Williams: So I created this massive Excel spreadsheet. Of all the matters that I knew about from lawyers bios, and where were they in the energy products? Like what was the client industry? What was the industry of the matter? That's what I learned. The difference between, just because a bank is doing an energy transaction doesn't mean that they're an energy company.
[00:09:54] Rachel Shields Williams: And so to me it makes a lot of sense. But from that time period, and so essentially I ended up building out this massive, around 3000 plus row spreadsheet of experience and, um, our CMO at the time caught wind of it and he is like, Hey, I'd like to talk to you. I was like, oh God, I'm gonna be in so much trouble.
[00:10:12] Rachel Shields Williams: And he's like, actually, you know, we'd like you to be the voice of business development as we're looking at a way to capture experience. Across the firm, and I think it comes from that ex, that timeframe of working with so many different laterals that had different objectives when they were joining the firm.
[00:10:29] Rachel Shields Williams: They joined the firm for different reasons. They had different pain points. Really started teaching me about the importance of data and also the interconnectivity.
[00:10:38] Tom Baldwin: Mm
[00:10:39] Rachel Shields Williams: of all of that information.
[00:10:41] Tom Baldwin: You keep hitting the segue, which is perfect. So speaking of that. Kind of interconnectivity. You've now sat at the intersection of business development, knowledge management, and now really a data focused role.
[00:10:52] Tom Baldwin: How have you seen the attitudes across around data evolve either across departments or within departments? I.
[00:11:00] Rachel Shields Williams: I am laughing because it's changed in the best way possible, and I can just tell my anecdotal story. In 2018, when I took on the role of being the product manager for our experience platform, a lot of people are like, well, that's never gonna succeed here.
[00:11:17] Rachel Shields Williams: You know, I'll, I'll be retired before. This is a working system. And I was like, oh God, what have I gotten myself into? I'm like, well, if this blows up in my face, I can always go back to bd. Like, you know what? Chambers hasn't changed, RFPs haven't changed, like, I'm good. Um, so I was like, all right, I'm up for the challenge and that attitude.
[00:11:39] Rachel Shields Williams: Has changed so much. You know, when we reach the point of, of having over a thousand users a month accessing and contributing this information, sitting down with our executive director, explaining to them the difference, like why my team, why I needed human beings to harmonize different data points because we didn't have a central point of harmonization for courts or names or, you know, regulations.
[00:12:06] Rachel Shields Williams: Just the simple things that. You don't think schools concepts that you don't think about, but when you wanna start putting them into Excel and Tableau and Power BI and whatnot, you have to normalize it. And if it's not normalized the source, it's gotta happen somewhere in the system. And so that appetite for change has just.
[00:12:27] Rachel Shields Williams: Is so amazing over the last seven years. And I've also seen it within the industry, um, you know, to legal marketing. When I first got into experience, I was like, everyone needs experience. Everyone's like, we have pitches. Experience is the same as pitches. And I'm like, no, it's not. It's fundamentally different.
[00:12:44] Rachel Shields Williams: It's a part of it, but the structure of it is fundamentally different. People are like, no, no, no. And I'm like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And now people are like, oh, experience is different than pitches. And I'm like. Yeah, mayonnaise is aioli. Um, yes, you are correct, but like watching that transition, 'cause for the longest time I felt like a bit of an outcast and a bit of an outlier because I'm not a lawyer and I'm not a technologist and I'm, you know, there's a long list of all the things that I'm not, and I felt like I was kind screaming into the void.
[00:13:16] Rachel Shields Williams: Um, and it felt like in 20 22, 20 23 with Gen AI becoming so popular. It felt like the voice started screaming back at me and I was like, oh, there is someone on the other line at the other end of this. And so it, it's been really exciting to watch, particularly the last couple of beers. People are becoming so much more enthusiastic about it.
[00:13:37] Rachel Shields Williams: And, you know, the generative AI craze has really driven home the importance of. Having good fundamental data and you know, yes, you can do stuff by brute force to make gen AI work for a use case.
[00:13:52] Tom Baldwin: Yep. But
[00:13:52] Rachel Shields Williams: it is not scalable or sustainable without, without a. Long-term data strategy and one voice guiding the direction.
[00:14:02] Tom Baldwin: I feel like I've been on that same solo rooftop shouting like, you can't scale ai. The way, the way uploading documents by hand from the DMS is not a scalable way to approach. It's, it's, it's an approach, but it's not scalable Yeah. At all.
[00:14:16] Rachel Shields Williams: Exactly. Yeah. Like throwing humans at something to make it work.
[00:14:20] Rachel Shields Williams: Defeats the purpose of chin, uh, of AI fair. Yeah. Like, I mean, yes, you need humans to verify things. Yes, you need humans to help identify the process and whatnot, but the whole point of exploring these expensive, intensive products is to free up human capacity, not require more humans. Yeah.
[00:14:42] Tom Baldwin: I wanted to shift gears a little bit and kind of talk about, you know, part of what we like to do on this show is both highlight, you know, successes and, and, and celebrate those, but also talk about sort of lessons learned and things, especially for folks that are relatively new on their data journey and they're just starting out.
[00:14:58] Tom Baldwin: If you could go back in time and tell Rachel a couple things like, Hey. Don't do this. Is there a project you recall, and I know it's hard to kind of like, uh, let too many bodies out of the, the bag a little bit, but like, are there any projects that didn't go as planned? And if so, like what, what did you learn from those experiences that you would want others to not repeat the same mistakes?
[00:15:17] Tom Baldwin: I.
[00:15:18] Rachel Shields Williams: Well, the first thing I'd say is like, I have failed more than I will ever succeed in this life. And the willingness to fail I think is a really important part of this. And it's the ability to notice when you're failing, be like, oh, this isn't working, and pivot. So that's actually one of the first pieces of advice I'd go back and give myself if I were starting over on this journey again, like.
[00:15:42] Rachel Shields Williams: Don't chase perfection. Don't worry about failing. Worry about not trying
[00:15:47] Tom Baldwin: go out there Before we get off of that though.
[00:15:49] Rachel Shields Williams: Yeah.
[00:15:49] Tom Baldwin: You have to have a culture that it, it allows for failure at a lot of law firms. Yeah. Failure's not an option, or at least the person you're reporting to does not accept failure.
[00:15:58] Tom Baldwin: And so how did you overcome that?
[00:16:01] Rachel Shields Williams: I will admit I have been insanely lucky in my career. I have had so many amazing managers here at Sidley. It started with the manager that hired me, Megan Peck. She's no longer in legal, but I just went, saw Kimberly Akimbo with her. The other night, I've worked for Barry Solomon, I've worked for Kate Kain, I've worked for Ann Falvey, you know, and now I work for a new lead, a leader new to Legal Jane Ream, and they've all given me the space to fail.
[00:16:30] Rachel Shields Williams: And it's one of those things that I'm not. I've never gone after some huge, big marquee project to fail. It's failing in small little bits. And also the other piece of advice to myself is realize when you're failing, have the self-awareness to go, Hmm, this ain't going so great. It's time to pivot.
[00:16:50] Tom Baldwin: Yeah.
[00:16:51] Rachel Shields Williams: Um,
[00:16:52] Tom Baldwin: yeah.
[00:16:52] Tom Baldwin: You hear the Trump fail fast, fail cheap, right? Like, fail quickly. Yeah. Recognize when you're failing. Don't go too long and don't fail big. Mm-hmm. I vividly remember. I went to this computer world conference one year, and when I was at Reed Smith, I thought, I was like, oh, I'm at Reed Smith, where it's 1800 lawyer firm.
[00:17:06] Tom Baldwin: We're so big, and I sit next to the CIO at Proctor and Gamble. They had more people in it than we had people at Reed Smith, like total. And he was recounting this story where he, part of his, he had 10 direct reports globally, and part of their annual review was they were required to demonstrate a failed initiative.
[00:17:25] Tom Baldwin: He expected it. Now again, it wasn't like, oh, we, we, you know. Pooped the bed on an ERP global platform. It was a small kind of skunk worky thing, but he really promoted and made it a safe space to innovate and break a few eggs along the way. And I thought that was fascinating. I thought, gosh, could you ever do that in a law firm?
[00:17:42] Tom Baldwin: Could you ever like write in as part of yourself eval, you must show a demonstrated failure, failed project. Can you imagine?
[00:17:50] Rachel Shields Williams: So, um, litigation Department of the year am l really a really coveted award does require law firms to say, talk about a case that you lost.
[00:18:00] Tom Baldwin: Hmm.
[00:18:01] Rachel Shields Williams: And why?
[00:18:02] Tom Baldwin: Interesting. That is fascinating.
[00:18:04] Tom Baldwin: I didn't know that. Yeah. Ah,
[00:18:06] Rachel Shields Williams: and just the other piece of advice I would go back and give myself, don't forget the people. Don't assume that you can go back and smooth things over with, with a stakeholder that's not invested.
[00:18:20] Tom Baldwin: Mm.
[00:18:21] Rachel Shields Williams: After the process. Take the time. You know what? It blows your project up. That's okay.
[00:18:27] Rachel Shields Williams: Because there is one project that stands out to me where I thought, because we ha I, I thought we had a stronger personal relationship than we had, and I thought I was gonna be able to go back and smooth things over and bring them along. I was wrong. And they created havoc for me for years. And the repercussions of that still show up when I work with a particular group of stakeholders to this day.
[00:18:54] Tom Baldwin: Hmm. Now, it's interesting 'cause when I've talked to other folks about this exact topic, one of the things I constantly hear is, you know, a lot of it's about upfront expectation setting. So if you kind of tell them in advance, Hey, we're about to embark on something that's kind of new, there's a good chance that we may not.
[00:19:09] Tom Baldwin: Meet every single expectation, and that sort of cuts the knees out a little bit. I get that some folks are never gonna want to hear that, but do you think that also is another success criteria when you have to circle back to somebody that maybe,
[00:19:23] Rachel Shields Williams: yeah, and Barry was really, so when Barry Solomon joined Sidley that he.
[00:19:27] Rachel Shields Williams: Took our department from a department of like 45 generalists to, um, by the time he left, I think we had a marketing department of about 110. Wow. And we actually had specialties and functions and he was really, really big on the under promise, over deliver concept. And that was also something that our family business was really big on.
[00:19:46] Tom Baldwin: There you go. So for
[00:19:46] Rachel Shields Williams: me, it, it's just kind of like a natural thing that like, I'm gonna under promise what I'm gonna be able to deliver. So like. You know, kind of keep your expectations low, uh, because these are hard things. The easy stuff is done, and if I meet, and also like, let's be honest, like big law has really big high expectations.
[00:20:06] Rachel Shields Williams: So even though I'm saying I'm low, I have a low bar. The low bar here is some other places, high watermark.
[00:20:11] Tom Baldwin: You've, you've spoken in, written quite a bit about hiring for traits over titles, especially kinda leaning into people that are curious, flexible, resilient. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about that.
[00:20:24] Rachel Shields Williams: I think it goes back to a comment I just made a little earlier. Um, when I came into knowledge management, people were very quick to tell me that I wasn't a lawyer, that I'm not a technologist. And I'm like, those are absolutely true. But I've just spent 10 years in the trenches with lawyers trying to acquire business.
[00:20:41] Rachel Shields Williams: So I might have an idea of what we're trying to do here. And I think because I've been told so much about all the things that I'm not, that I, I. Wouldn't qualify for so many of my exact job at another firm because of the requirements law firms put on. But I excel at, you know, one of the world's larger successful law firms, um, because of my soft skills, because of people's skills, because I am curious and I ask why, and I say, tell me more about that.
[00:21:13] Rachel Shields Williams: And. When people give me really hard feedback, sometimes the feedback's warranted. Sometimes like, yeah, this is actually like fair. Other times, you know it's getting the ugly sweater from grandma and you smile and you say thank you so much, and you take the ugly sweater and you fold it up and you put it in the closet.
[00:21:31] Rachel Shields Williams: You write your thank you note and you're done with it. And who knows, maybe that ugly sweater is gonna be hip in a couple years, or you know, someone else is gonna come in the closet and fall in love with the sweater. Who knows. And I think that I'm able to kind of keep that mindset because of resiliency.
[00:21:46] Rachel Shields Williams: And I, and I think that in innovation, you need to have it because you're not gonna please all the people. You're gonna disrupt status quo. People are gonna be scared. You're threatening their, you're not threatening their livelihood. But it's a very easy to see what we're doing at. How it could be perceived as a threat to their livelihood.
[00:22:06] Rachel Shields Williams: You know? So you get a lot of emotional baggage that's not really yours to bear. And you have to have a certain level of resiliency to just be like, Hmm, okay, I'm gonna go home now. I'm gonna go on vacation, rather than let it like crush you. And I think that hiring for those skills is just so important.
[00:22:24] Rachel Shields Williams: 'cause like. We, I can teach you technology. I didn't know any of this Intrinsically, dare I say it like you can watch a PLI webinar and learn more about securities law if we need to dig into something with securities law. Like there's a lot of information out there where you can become. You can deepen the subject matter information, but soft skills I find are a lot harder for people to develop, particularly as we get older.
[00:22:52] Rachel Shields Williams: So, yeah, I, I am, you know, give me someone who's curious and nice to work with and resilient and just wants to help people any day over someone who has, you know, a pile of degrees from Ivy League universities.
[00:23:08] Tom Baldwin: A fair comment, if you looked at the. Before there was big data projects around hiring. I used to tell firms like, you don't even need to do anything fancy.
[00:23:17] Tom Baldwin: Look at your top 20 rainmakers and just look at the law schools they went to. For every Harvard law grad, there's gonna be a not Harvard Law alumnus that's just as proficient if not more prolific at rainmaking. That's because they have these other soft skills traits that, that some don't. Yeah. So we talked a little bit about sort of things, lessons learned.
[00:23:34] Tom Baldwin: Let's pivot to something that, you know, a, a project that you're particularly proud of, where you thought, huh, this is exactly why we need data. It's the center of what we do.
[00:23:42] Rachel Shields Williams: I have to say, the fact that we've actually established a firm-wide chief function for data and ai, I am like, oh, okay. Like, it wasn't just the work that I did, it was work across the firm, but I know that the work that I've done over the last seven years contributed to the.
[00:23:58] Rachel Shields Williams: To the embracing of this level. It was so cool that when they built this function, they brought together people from it, from finance, from marketing, from knowledge management that all of us that were working in small, disparate groups. So like I wasn't alone, but definitely I think the work that my team and I have been doing definitely contributed for.
[00:24:22] Rachel Shields Williams: Helping people understand the business case for the investment here. But I think the larger thing that I'm proud of is the teams that I've built and the people that I've hired and seeing them go on to do great, amazing stuff. You know, I always tell my team that our time working together is just a moment in time in your career, but I hope that our relationships.
[00:24:45] Rachel Shields Williams: Are long term and it's so cool to see people who've left the team at other firms doing great work, seeing them at, you know, ILTA and Groundbreakers and you know, when I go back to Chicago, reaching out to them and having coffee or having dinner like. That's the part that I'm most proud of is just the team that I'm building.
[00:25:04] Rachel Shields Williams: When people say like, oh, I met so and so on your team, they're so great. I'm like, yes, they are, aren't they? Um, and I think that that's the part that, you know, really helps me, really inspires me to keep on doing my work, is to continue to build and hold the door open for. Younger folks, people who wouldn't typically see themselves in big law.
[00:25:26] Tom Baldwin: One thing I wanted to just double click on a little bit was your comment that like the work you did was part of a larger awakening. It sort of, so to speak, that sidley realized, hey, we need to have a dedicated focus on data. And then the other comment you made that I think is really important is that.
[00:25:41] Tom Baldwin: Data is not a siloed. And if you're gonna have a data function, it can't be siloed. It's gotta be representative. And we call this big tent pro. These are big tent projects, meaning I need representation from every function at the firm. I need marketing, I need hr, I need finance, I need km. If you have a KM function, I need it, but I need everybody involved.
[00:26:02] Tom Baldwin: Um,
[00:26:02] Rachel Shields Williams: yeah, let's not forget about our friends In conflicts, they are like the mother load of information.
[00:26:09] Tom Baldwin: Yeah, the more the merrier. So I'm glad that that sort of manifested the way it did. That's amazing. When we talk about sort of looking ahead to the future of data analytics, ai, you've mentioned, you know, your thoughts around traditional experience management and sort of what the longevity of that looks like.
[00:26:24] Tom Baldwin: What, what do you, what do you mean by that?
[00:26:27] Rachel Shields Williams: So, if you think about. Uh, a Lakehouse for a long time it was like, oh, we need a data warehouse. It's a place that loves structured data. Then came the data lakes. There are places that love the unstructured data, but law firms, we really need a combination of the two.
[00:26:45] Rachel Shields Williams: And you know, I think the modern experience management systems. It pretty much started to allow us to have that combination of structured and unstructured data together in one place. And like I like to think of them as like a gateway drug to these larger data programs. It helps highlight the need, the investment, why to do it.
[00:27:06] Rachel Shields Williams: And if you think about it, like Modern Experience Management is a bunch of sequel tables that talk to each other, and that's kind of what's happening in a lake house is a bunch of sequel tables talking to each other. So if you think about it, like to interact with it and search and ask for information, that's where I see a lot of chat and AI and you know, agents and all these things, helping you put together a pitch, find pricing, find deal points, find relevant documents, like I see that.
[00:27:38] Rachel Shields Williams: And then if you just have a UX that allows people to take. Their implicit knowledge that we can extract from a document or what have you, and contribute that to those SQL tables that are running in the background. It, it just, I think the interconnectivity is going to make way for a much larger, centralized platform that then has different spokes in which, how you interact with the data versus right now in the center.
[00:28:06] Rachel Shields Williams: We have a whole bunch of technologies that are talking to each other through APIs. Maybe there is a data warehouse, but when you think about the time and money that you need to invest, even if you're working with a product to have a lake house, like the data governance that you need to follow, the medallions that you need to take care of, does it really make sense to continue to invest in all these bespoke products or does it make sense to.
[00:28:35] Rachel Shields Williams: Invest in bespoke interfaces that support these different use cases. Mm-hmm. Because also the world's changing so fast. What are we, how are we gonna need to interact with it in six months a year?
[00:28:49] Tom Baldwin: Right.
[00:28:49] Rachel Shields Williams: Who knows?
[00:28:50] Tom Baldwin: That's an interesting perspective, and I think as we start to look at more and more firms leaning into this, they're starting to realize that whether it's experience management or financial reporting system, or a bespoke niche.
[00:29:03] Tom Baldwin: D and I reporting system, they all become kind of these individual pilot silos and pockets of data. Something as simple as, Hey, how many lawyers are at Sidley? Without a unified platform, you are not gonna get a consistent answer. Yeah. And the minute you have inconsistencies, the lawyers stop trusting it, regardless of where it comes from.
[00:29:21] Tom Baldwin: So having that single source of truth, it can power everything else. Right.
[00:29:25] Rachel Shields Williams: Yeah, exactly. I was just gonna say, and you mentioned a couple, and I think sometimes CRMs and ERMs get left outta the conversation of the centralization, but I think that's just as important as accounting. HR matters, documents, ERMs and CRMs are telling you who is interacting with you, how, when, and how, and that is.
[00:29:47] Rachel Shields Williams: Critical. Do you really wanna create like gold standard documents out of someone who only talks to you like once every five years? Or someone who doesn't, you know, only pays 70% of their bills? And that's a question for each organization to answer. But you need to put the data together so people can answer those questions in a way that's in line with the firm strategy.
[00:30:10] Tom Baldwin: A hundred percent. You've been at this data game indirectly and directly for a long time, and for firms just starting out or thinking about starting out, there's always this hesitation that they think because they don't have perfect data, they have to wait until they get everything just right and then they can start looking at data.
[00:30:28] Tom Baldwin: What's your message to firms that are in that state?
[00:30:32] Rachel Shields Williams: If you chase perfection, you'll never get progress. Progress is incremental. By the time you reach perfection, it's outdated. It's not relevant to you anymore. And if you're constantly chasing perfection, you're constantly changing the goalpost on yourself.
[00:30:47] Rachel Shields Williams: So I would say pick a question. And try to answer it, you know, an unpopular one is start with your industries. Your clients have already told you their industry. What a great place to start. Start the conversations, see who talks about what, where, why, and just start, you know, because to your point, industry is something that touches all these groups that we've talked about and something that's really important for.
[00:31:14] Rachel Shields Williams: All of them and our clients have already told us their industry. When you go onto CapIQ or their website, like you don't have to guess as to what you know Amazon's industry is. They've told you.
[00:31:26] Tom Baldwin: Right. Well, how would you, okay, so firm, the firms hear that, some might hear that. How would you help Affirm balance sort of this desire for short-term wins and a long-term data strategy?
[00:31:42] Rachel Shields Williams: Pulling on the thread of industries, I would take your top 500 clients and go grab, Hey, it's that time of year. Let's grab a summer associate, give 'em a cap IQ license, and have them start pulling down those industries. And that's gonna start telling you what are your key industries, and then putting that in front of people and let people react.
[00:32:04] Rachel Shields Williams: And if someone's like, uh, I don't really think of Amazon as a tech company. Amazon, to me, they're a transportation company. You might find out that actually there's a huge transportation practice at your firm. So that's an area that even though. The industry tree is a little short. You may need, need to create more depth for, but if you look at that top 500 clients, that's gonna give you the bulk of where your focus is.
[00:32:28] Rachel Shields Williams: And within there you're gonna be able to identify what areas do you need to dig deeper on? Where do you need to customize, what are those go to market strategies where you're gonna need more nuance? And then there's gonna be other industries where you can just simply say hospitality. Because it's not a big part.
[00:32:45] Rachel Shields Williams: So you can put hotels, you can put gambling, you can put water parks, you know, just write down what you're calling hospitality. You know, just start with a small subset. Like don't sit there and say, I'm gonna take every client that's been active in the last decade. Take the top 500, take the top. You know what, if you're like, that's too much, take the top 100 and then start working with those partners and see their reaction to those lists.
[00:33:10] Rachel Shields Williams: And if they say, no, tell me more. What do you think? Why do you think that? Ask those open-ended questions to start pulling on the threads to figure out how you need to build your industry taxonomy and what that maps back to in a third party source. I.
[00:33:28] Tom Baldwin: Now you're getting a little fancy though, but yeah, you're right.
[00:33:31] Tom Baldwin: Okay, last, last theme and topic that I want to cover with you. So one of the coolest things about you, Rachel, is that you've been, uh, elected the incoming president of the Legal Marketing Association, even though you're no longer technically a marketer, which A says how awesome you are and B, how cool the organization is that they recognize talent.
[00:33:52] Tom Baldwin: Supersedes titles, which is a topic we mentioned earlier. So I, I think that's amazing. But as you sort of step back and look at the intersection of marketing BD and data, how do you see those two be all, oh, not those two, but those topics and those areas becoming more integrated.
[00:34:07] Rachel Shields Williams: It's that idea of, it's all connected with, I used to say knowledge management a lot without marketing, knowledge management has nothing to manage, but without knowledge management, marketing has no knowledge to market.
[00:34:21] Rachel Shields Williams: And these two are interwoven so deeply, the different information. And for marketers to have that strategic, proactive seat that they want, that they talk about wanting. You have to understand how to talk the language of the business, and that means you need to have a fluency in data. You need to be able to understand it, not be afraid of it.
[00:34:43] Rachel Shields Williams: And so when you're pushing back about, you know why we're not going to pursue basket weaving in Mongolia as a strategy, you need to be able to point out to it. And please don't laugh about Mongolia. I did an RFP that came to me torn out of a newspaper in Mongolian that we had to get translated to even understand how to get the RFP.
[00:35:03] Rachel Shields Williams: So Mongolia is a real. It was a hotbed of a place in like 2012 to 2016. But, you know, how do you, you know, 'cause marketers, the, there's only so much time in the day. You can only support so many initiatives and if you can't understand the data and you can't talk to the data of why you're pursuing this strategy over that strategy.
[00:35:25] Rachel Shields Williams: You're just gonna be an order taker, and no one wants to do that. And so I really think that, you know, the rise of the data-driven marketer is here. AI is here. It's not gonna replace marketing, but it's going to help marketers work more efficiently, work smarter, faster, you know, take cool things like this podcast that we're doing here.
[00:35:44] Rachel Shields Williams: Do you wanna turn it into an article? Do you wanna turn it into an animated skit? You know. How do you wanna repurpose this content information that is the future for us as legal marketers?
[00:35:57] Tom Baldwin: So just to, to wrap up RSW, amazing time with you or any, any final words that you would wanna impart on our listeners as they either want to expand on their data journey or get started,
[00:36:09] Rachel Shields Williams: say yes.
[00:36:11] Rachel Shields Williams: Go try and stay positive about it. 'cause you'll probably fall a couple times. Just, there's plenty of helping hands to help you get back up.
[00:36:20] Tom Baldwin: Amazing. Rachel. Thank you so much. Have a great weekend. Cheers. Thank
[00:36:24] Rachel Shields Williams: you. You too. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye.
[00:36:27] Tom Baldwin: That's a wrap for this episode of Overruled by Data. If this podcast resonated with you, if you took one or two things away from it, you want to hear more from law firm leaders that have been there and done that hit the fall button.