Robert Ambrogi Blog
Dave Lewis, a data scientist whose four-decade career has established him as a pioneer in artificial intelligence and data analytics in law, has joined the e-discovery and litigation management company Nextpoint as chief scientific officer, where he will lead efforts to develop the next generation of machine learning and generative AI tools throughout the Nextpoint software platform.
Lewis was most recently chief scientific officer at Redgrave Data, a consulting firm that specialized in e-discovery and data science. In September, Redgrave was acquired by the legal software and services provider Elevate, where Lewis became vice president of consulting. In August, a month before the acquisition, Lewis was a guest on my LawNext podcast to discuss gen AI as the new paradigm for technology assisted review in e-discovery.
Prior to joining Redgrave, Lewis was executive vice president for AI research, development and ethics at Reveal-Brainspace, where he designed and led the development of machine learning, language processing, and statistical evaluation techniques for e-discovery and enterprise text analytics applications.
He has also held research positions at the University of Chicago, Bell Labs, and AT&T Labs, and has been a consultant to more than 50 corporations, government organizations, law firms, and investors, including on multiple high-profile and multi-billion dollar litigations.
“I’ve long admired the pioneering vision and engineering accomplishments of the Nextpoint team,” Lewis said. “I’m thrilled to be joining that team at this pivotal moment for legal AI technology, and look forward to us building tools that make the practice of law radically more efficient and effective.”
Rakesh Madhava, founder and CEO of Nextpoint, said that in his many conversations with Lewis about the future of legal tech, they saw that their values and technical beliefs aligned.
“For over 20 years, Nextpoint has led the legal industry in the design and delivery of practical, secure internet-based technologies,” Madhava said. “It’s in our DNA. We were the first to leverage the power and scale of cloud-computing in legal tech, and adding Dr. Lewis’ expertise to our leadership team is just further confirmation of our continued commitment to technology innovation.”
Lewis told me that his number one priority as he steps into the position will be talking to the sales team and to clients about what they are asking for. “But technically it will come of no surprise that I’ll be particularly focused on AI: both traditional AI and generative AI.”
“One of the things that excites me about the Nextpoint platform is that it runs all the way from ingestion through trial preparation. I’ve most worked at the center of the EDRM in the past — search, TAR, and so on. I’m really excited about the possibilities for generative AI farther left and right in the EDRM.
“While there’s interesting applications in gen AI replacing or augmenting TAR,” he said, “I think its really strengths are on more constructive tasks: generating summaries, answering questions, creating other knowledge artifacts.”
Over the course of his career, Lewis pioneered many techniques that are now common in text analytics. In 2006, he was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 2016, he received the Test of Time Award from the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval.
Among his other credits, Lewis co-chaired the EDRM working group on AI Ethics and Bias, served on the executive committee for the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law from 2017 to 2021, and served and on the Seventh Circuit Electronic Discovery Pilot Program Committee from 2012 to 2020.
Lewis has bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and computer science from Michigan State University and a doctorate in computer science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.