2022 TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
Reduce Risk and Cost by Leveraging AI and Cloud Computing Steve Cole, DISCO
CCBJ: To start off, Steve, tell us about your background and what sparked your interest in legal technology. Steven Cole: I’m a lawyer by training. I litigated for about six years, working on mostly large, discovery-intensive matters. As I’ve loved technology ever since I was a kid, I was drawn to emerging legal technologies, realizing that a lot of work I was doing could be more interesting, and more fun, using computers. E-discovery didn’t really exist when I was handling these large matters; my focus was on collaboration and knowledge management. What gets me excited today is the marked acceleration of innovation in the legal vertical. My long-awaited expectations,
Steve Cole Steven Cole has experience managing large cases as a practicing attorney which helped him see multiple ways technology could help lawyers work more efficiently. He made this his career and never looked back. At DISCO, Steve heads up our corporate market’s sales strategy and efforts. In doing so he’s guided by many years working with corporate and law firm counsel on their most sensitive and strategic initiatives. Technology matters, service matters, and commitment to excellence can never waiver.
especially regarding the ability to leverage artificial intelligence in our practice by simply clicking a button, are now a reality. We can turn on AI and lawyers are able to understand their case in a matter of hours, or maybe a couple of days, versus the few weeks of review it previously took to get their arms around the subject, and the corpus of their data. This is the real, current state. It’s no longer something that’s aspirational, and I’m just personally excited to be involved in this transformation of our industry. In your role, you meet with in-house legal teams regularly. What are the greatest challenges they are facing, and what advice do you provide to address their larger issues? Meeting with corporate in-house teams across so many verticals has been my absolute favorite aspect of my role. Corporate counsel are increasingly being asked to control costs and to do more with less. As you might expect, this has put pressure on key employees, and talent retention is very much on GCs’ minds. Doing more with less involves identifying where and how work actually gets done and exploring how it can get done more efficiently. The advice I offer to anyone beginning this journey is to identify how people are spending their time, and whether the right work is being done by the right person. Are there routine but costly non-
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