Big data and in-house lawyers
GC looks at big data analytics and what it means for in-house teams and their businesses.
‘Big data’ is becoming a buzzword in all walks of business life, and legal is no exception – whether that involves supporting your business in its forays into big data or using big data to inform processes in the legal department itself. But what becomes increasingly clear on talking to proponents (or opponents) of this most cutting edge of technologies is that there seems to be no consensus about what it actually is.
Linda NiChualladh is communications, regulation, data protection, EU and competition counsel at state-owned Irish postal services company An Post, which has worked extensively on big data, data warehousing and upskilling staff accordingly. She has thought about this a lot. ‘At one stage, I had 23 definitions of what big data actually means,’ she says. Broadly speaking, it encompasses the accumulation, storage and use of large amounts of data from multiple sources in order to extrapolate trends, make predictions or connections, and generally reveal something that only a comparison of datasets can uncover.
