Speakers

Making Unstructured Data a Strategic Advantage: Lessons from Firms That Get It Right

Law firms have been fighting unstructured data sprawl for decades, but the problem has evolved from “storage hygiene” to business, security and compliance risk and now AI risk and opportunity. In this session, ActiveNav Founder and CEO, Peter Baumann, traces how we got here, unpacks the three most common cleanup strategies law firms rely on (and why they consistently stall), and outlines the operating model used by firms that stay in control.

Key Learnings

1. Why we’re at a tipping-point moment: unstructured data sprawl + collaboration platforms + legacy content have made cleanup temporary fixes, at best and add friction to AI. 
2. Why the standard playbooks fail: the three most common approaches create short-term progress but don’t change the conditions that recreate the mess. 
3. What successful firms do differently: they shift from episodic projects to a repeatable operating model: visibility, ownership, governance that scales, and defensible decisions that stick. 
4.  What “AI readiness” really looks like: how the firms that win start with discoverability, classification, continuous governance, and the right tools for the job.