“We spent the time to learn and feel confident we know what we’re talking about, and if you want to push the envelope here and partner with us—get on board. Because we’re ready to drive it.”
Michallynn Demiter, e-discovery expert at Bayer and a 2024 AI Visionary, is an incredible advocate for AI and smarter ways of working for her team. And she’s not shy about pushing those priorities with outside counsel and vendors who support Bayer’s in-house legal work, either.
“We paint the vision for them: ‘You can be a partner in forging this new path with us.’ In taking that approach, we grew to be the number-one corporate adopter of active learning for Relativity,” she told us at Relativity Fest 2023.
Teams like Michallynn’s—sophisticated, in-house champions who are feeling pressured to do more with less in an increasingly litigious and highly regulated marketplace, and see technology as a key investment to facilitate responding to those pressures without crumbling—play an important role in driving innovation for the legal world.
By leaning on their software providers, service partners, and supporting firms to move the needle on new efficiencies and workflows, they help usher in the new tech that will help solve real-world challenges.
Not all in-house professionals take this approach. The ones who do will stand out. Based on Michallynn’s insights, keep reading to learn the four most important soft skills that can help you be one of them.
#1: Maintaining an innovative mindset.
“e-Discovery is a constantly evolving discipline so you have to be comfortable with change and learning new things,” Michallynn said.
We couldn’t agree more. But Michallynn acknowledges that this doesn’t mean willy-nilly pursuit of every shiny, new thing that appears on the market.
On generative AI specifically, she said: “I have to admit I was skeptical at first; I did not anticipate the speed at which generative AI would take over the legal space!”
A healthy dose of caution is a good thing. You have to be ready to experiment, test your hypotheses, and embrace the results (whether they affirm your instincts or go against them).
Now that she’s had a chance to do that, Michallynn is fully on board. And she’s thrilled to see others feeling the same—an uncommon glimmer of tech excitement in a historically slow-to-adopt field.
“I am excited by the openness and willingness of the legal world to explore ways in which generative AI can be leveraged to accelerate the work we do,” she told us. “It is very inspiring to be at what feels like the forefront of this technology adoption.”
In many ways, embracing AI requires the same hard skills e-discovery professionals have already honed. It’s the willingness to apply those skills in a new area, with a new modifier, that creates an environment for growth.
“e-Discovery folks know data, have been talking about growing data volumes for years, and now we have generative AI that can help us solve some the challenges we have been facing,” Michallynn explained. “How exciting is that?”
#2: Nurturing a collaborative, creative team.
In any environment, but especially a corporate one, it’s just about impossible to build momentum with a new tool or idea if you don’t have the buy-in and support of those around you. No business decisions can be made in a vacuum, and real change is hard to implement if its champion is advocating to a proverbial brick wall.
On the flip side, with many perspectives, many open minds, and a collaborative spirit on your side, you can do just about anything.
At Bayer, Michallynn’s team is passionate about doing things right—and evolving rapidly to keep pace with a scientific and technological landscape that’s always advancing.
“We’re on a mission: health for all, hunger for none,” she told us. “We have experimentation in our DNA. We have that science mindset. So if we see opportunities to drive efficiency or adopt new technology, we’re totally empowered to take it.”
Embracing the talents of technology, legal, and many other teams to take advantage of those opportunities have helped her organization accomplish some incredible things. Creating this kind of environment requires recruiting, hiring, coaching, and collaborating with the kind of people who are eager for the same type of innovation.
#3: Applying critical thinking.
Critical thinking—performing an intentional, objective evaluation of a concept before arriving at a judgment or position on it—is essential in all areas of business. It’s no different in AI, of course.
“You’re looking to AI to assist or amplify work that you’re doing, but you really need to step back and consider: What are the inputs? What are the outputs?” Michallynn said. “And how do you handle that interaction with the AI—this human and AI interaction—to get the results that you’re looking for?”
This should be a first step in the evaluation of any new technology. And it isn’t just the question of whether you’ll use it that requires critical thinking. How you use it, too, must be deliberately considered.
“You hear a lot about prompt engineering—you have to think about things in a different way to craft a prompt that will tell the machine how to get what you’re looking for,” Michallynn explained. “So it’s a different skill set, and it’s been a stretch trying to learn that—but also super exciting.”
AI is meant to assist human intellectual labor, but that doesn’t mean the AI can think like you do. With generative AI in particular, according to Michallynn and many of our other AI Visionaries (look out for their insights in the coming months), the quality of your results depends very much on not just what questions you ask—but how you ask them.
Using some critical thinking skills to experiment with prompt engineering is a great way to move quickly along the learning curve with generative AI.
#4: Prioritizing ongoing learning.
And speaking of learning—you ought to be doing a lot of it, at all times, if you want to build a career on AI advocacy.
“As cheesy as it sounds, knowledge really is power here. If you or your organization are hesitant to adopt AI, examine why that is,” Michallynn advised. “Seek out those in your network with opposing opinions or adoption strategies and talk with them to understand their approaches and if they overcame any of the same concerns you have. Read up on the technologies and how organizations in your industry have leveraged AI to their benefit.”
There are many avenues through which you can dig deeper and learn about the history, current state, and future development of artificial intelligence in a legal context. It’s one benefit of reading and hearing “AI” just about everywhere you look.
“It is pretty clear that AI is here to stay in some shape or form, so putting in the work now to understand it and how it can apply to your work will help benefit your career long-term,” Michallynn told us.
And if you want to get meta about it, Michallynn also told us that generative AI is here to help you learn all about—generative AI. Among other topics!
It can help coach you through technical skills like coding. Michallynn has enjoyed using it for that purpose.
“It’s such a huge time savings, and also incredibly empowering. I can leverage ChatGPT and similar Ais to help get me where I need to go, faster,” she explained.
Ask ChatGPT anything and you’ll accomplish two steps forward in one: practicing your prompt engineering chops, and absorbing some really great information as you parse through the answers.
Sam Bock is a member of the marketing team at Relativity, and serves as editor of The Relativity Blog.
