A Conversation with Laura Cloney | Interview by Gina Taranto, PhD
[EDRM Editor’s Note: The opinions and positions are those of Gina Taranto, PhD.]
Previously Published in This Series
In Part I of this series, I observed that Legalweek 2026 marked a transitional moment for eDiscovery – something of a fond farewell to the “eDiscovery of yore” as the world moves into the age of AI and we shift to something that isn’t yet fully defined.
In Parts II – IV, I bring in an expert on the future of work and talent acquisition to pressure test my interpretation of what’s happening and to add expert insight about what this practically means for eDiscovery professionals.
Laura Cloney is the founder of LC Talent Labs, a modern resource for anyone seeking to hire or position themselves to find work in an evolving world. She has generously agreed to sit down with me to discuss the future of work in eDiscovery (and beyond) for the EDRM audience.
Laura and I met about 20 years ago, just as Technology Assisted Review offered a new and disruptive approach to eDiscovery and Document Review. For early adopters, TAR had a huge impact on the way work got done, and on how we recruited and hired talent, and organized teams to meet the moment. Since then, Laura has built talent acquisition and workplace culture programs across numerous technology-forward fields. In the context of the impact Artificial Intelligence is having on the future of work, Laura’s depth and breadth of knowledge make her a natural choice for helping us understand the changes and opportunities in our field.
We begin this week by unpacking what it means when we say, “eDiscovery is dead,” and we identify the great value that the durable skills in a discovery practitioner’s toolkit bring to a corporate workforce and job market in transition. We then talk about how one’s skills and experience can be repackaged and reframed in a time when many organizations are racing to incorporate new technology into old business models, at the same time, many are also racing to update and invent new business models.
Below is a consolidated summary of our discussion, edited for clarity.
01 | Unpacking “eDiscovery is dead” — Is it true? What does that even mean?
GT: Laura, I’m excited for you to share your knowledge with the EDRM audience – not only with the changes we are seeing with jobs and work in legal technology, but also with your take on the future of work more generally.
Let’s start our conversation from where I left off in Part I of this series – I claimed that “It’s the End of eDiscovery as We Know It,” or more dramatically, that eDiscovery is dead. While that sounds ominous, I also believe what’s coming is even more interesting and presents a lot of opportunities. So, when I laid out this framing to you originally, what was your reaction?
LC: My first reaction was: Yes, let’s say the quiet part out loud. I think a lot of people across a lot of industries are feeling this way. Massive change is afoot because every industry is either embracing AI or feeling pressure to adopt AI, whether they want to or not. Regardless of where an industry or organization is on their “AI Journey,” the conversation about AI is everywhere. If the big change isn’t already here, the overarching sense is that it’s coming. And with any massive change, this has the potential to make us feel a certain way.
So, the instinct to reach a dramatic language is right, even if reality is more nuanced. Sure, the word “dead” is provocative, but what it’s really pointing at is transformation. The eDiscovery skills, workflows and rigor that practitioners have spent careers developing – none of those skills are becoming obsolete. What is changing is where and how those skills are applied to add value. And where there are any new automations, or “AI-powered” solutions and workflows, being deployed and adopted.
The eDiscovery skills, workflows and rigor that practitioners have spent careers developing – none of those skills are becoming obsolete.
Laura Cloney, Founder, LC Talent Labs.
GT: So maybe it’s more like “eDiscovery is Dead! Long Live eDiscovery.”
LC: I think that works.
02 | The current job market
GT: Let’s set the stage about the current job market in the middle of what you’ve described as a “re-write”. What’s your take on the state of the market and the re-write of corporate work?
LC: Candidly? I think we are in the middle of the biggest redesign any of us have seen in our careers. It’s an employer’s market for sure. And it has teeth. As employers make quick pivots to keep up with big promises and expectations about AI, we are seeing layoffs become so frequent that they feel seasonal. And we’re becoming hardened to them, given this frequency. This hardening overshadows the fact that companies still need skills and are still hiring. Even though they aren’t necessarily hiring 1:1 for the jobs that are going away, it’s important that they are still hiring, so I want to repeat this:
- Companies still need skills, and they are still hiring.
It’s also important to call out that, while some roles will go away, newer ones are being created and will emerge. A market like this can feel personal for sure, but when we step back and look from the 30,000-foot view, and take ourselves out of it for a minute, it makes sense that this is happening. Of course, the way we get work needs to be redesigned with the scale and pace of AI promises. eDiscovery isn’t alone in this redesign. It’s an example of a process that is playing out in many fields. And that’s important because the scale and scope of this redesign will enable new opportunities within as well as across industries.
So for eDiscovery and legal technology, we’ve got a situation where AI promises to compress timelines and lower costs by automating first‑level review, prioritizing key documents, and enabling natural‑language search across massive datasets. This will shift work away from large review teams toward smaller, AI‑literate experts who supervise models, handle edge cases, and focus on case strategy. And remember that eDiscovery isn’t the only area in legal feeling an impact. AI-powered solutions also support legal research, legal writing, and more.
With AI forcing a rethink of pricing, defensibility standards, and data‑governance practices across the enterprise, one opportunity for eDiscovery professionals within legal is to position themselves as the strategic ‘bridge’ between legal teams and AI tools by owning defensibility, process design, and change management rather than competing with automation.
Moving outside of discovery teams and legal support, experienced practitioners can look for higher‑value roles that design, supervise, and explain AI‑driven workflows in any domain. The opportunity is to layer AI fluency into roles across domains where judgment, communication, and cross‑functional leadership matter. If your eDiscovery experience has previously been with clients in finance, pharma, manufacturing, whatever – those organizations and industries are undergoing their own re-writes where your experience implementing and validating business process is valuable.
The key takeaway, I think, is that many core skills are still needed; their value is amplified. How we use those skills in new ways is worth considering, as is adding new skills (skill stacking), but the biggest change is that the labels for the work and the job descriptions are changing.
03 | Shifting focus from Job Titles and Labels to Skills and Experience
GT: Can you say more about what you mean by what’s changing in the label and the job description?
LC: What I mean is roles are being redefined to adapt to new technology, tools, and workflows. The change in the work is happening faster than we can keep up in terms of having universal alignment on either the new kinds of work or the names of the jobs that do the work. And I should add that this is not a new phenomenon: anytime there is new technology, roles and job responsibilities evolve.
From the talent acquisition perspective, we already know that the language we use to describe work can lag behind establishing industry standards for job requirements, titles, and levels. We already know that redefining a job and giving it a name takes iteration. What feels different this time is that the pace and scope of change are faster than what most professionals have seen in their career. We are seeing churn in the marketplace as organizations eliminate positions and introduce new positions without an established sense of the new jobs we’re defining and hiring for, and without shared vocabulary for posting and filling open positions. The job descriptions almost need to be fluid, as do the skills we add and master to fill those jobs.
In this time of massive change, in order to pair people who can do the work up with the work that’s out there that needs doing – if we can’t rely on job titles and job labels, what we can do is focus on getting crystal clear on the necessary skills and problem-solving approaches that are valuable.
- For organizations seeking support, we can shift focus to being clear about the problem that needs to be solved, and the skills are required to solve it. A business leader’s sense of the business problem and the skills that will help is likely clearer than a robust job description for an emerging role.
- For anyone managing a career, the framing of what you have to offer needs to shift to durable skills and your approach to assessing and solving problems. It’s more important than ever to articulate how your skills enable you to respond to change and how you use your skills to get things done.
Whether you are seeking talent or managing your career, if you wait for a job title to catch up before making a move or making a hire, you’ll be waiting a while. This is part of why we are seeing things like modular careers and portfolio careers garnering so much attention. These non-traditional structures work when a business can leverage an individual or small team to fill a need while things remain in flux, and it’s not yet clear how certain skills will be incorporated into the organization when there’s more stability around our new technology and the accompanying workflows.
04 | Repackaging Skills and Experience, and Reconsidering How Work Gets Done
GT: Can we walk through an example of this “skills focus”? Take us through how a “search consultant” might repackage their skills and experience now that “AI-powered” solutions have introduced “prompt engineering.” Let’s be clear that these aren’t the same thing; it’s not simply changing the label. But many skills that make a good search consultant are foundational for engineering effective prompts. What’s your take?
LC: This is a great example. Whether we’re talking about a “search consultant” or a “prompt engineer” – and I’d probably put another emerging role, the “context engineer,” in the mix here – the traditional problem for an eDiscovery search consultant is about finding information in structured or unstructured data to answer a question, or build an argument, or calculate an amount or measure and report on a value.
What’s important to note is that these kinds of problems are ones that need to be solved across all kinds of business operations. This is what we’re engineering prompts to do. So, the same core skills you are pointing to – wrangling complex data, building rigorous workflows, validating technology, QC-ing results – these are likewise applicable to all kinds of business operations. The professionals who have built these skills are sitting on more value than they may realize.
So, the same core skills you are pointing to – wrangling complex data, building rigorous workflows, validating technology, QC-ing results – these are likewise applicable to all kinds of business operations.
Laura Cloney, Founder, LC Talent Labs.
The challenge, and this is what I spend most of my time on, is helping people translate that value in a market that is in the middle of a re-write and may have needs that differ depending on many variables. In this case, what’s important is to be able to abstract away from a narrow use case and show that the skills of gathering requirements, defining problems, engineering workflows, executing solutions, validating results, and presenting them show that all of these skills are what you have.
We will pause our conversation here for a week. In next week’s post, we will talk about how to package and talk about business needs, skills, and experience in the context of a corporate world at the beginning of a re-write.
Continue Reading
- Part III: The Evolution of Career Planning (Modern Career Assets for a New Era)
- Part IV: The Enduring Value of Human Connection (or, Intentionality and Centering People)
Assisted by GAI and LLM Technologies per EDRM’s GAI and LLM Policy.
