The “Building an AI Practice for Email Data” panel that helped launch Thursday's finale to the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) Institute 2019 delved into a relatively complex problem hiding in plain sight inside many legal departments.

Discussion leader Jason Barnwell, assistant general counsel at Microsoft, outlined the issue succinctly: Leadership inside corporate legal departments want artificial intelligence and machine learning tools applied to the work that's being done so that they can reap the benefits of the strategic and performance-based insights achievable through data. But much of that data is trapped inside the various email accounts that make up the company's personnel roster.

“Many of my colleagues use email as their task list or a filing cabinet,” Barnwell said.

Some might be tempted to ask what kind of useful data could possibly be nestled within an inbox alongside the spam and weekly reminders to clean out the fridge in the break room.

Barnwell pointed out that email data can be useful for identifying subject matter experts within a company. He also argued that by looking at the number of emails sent in relation to any one subject, companies can attain a pretty good idea of the most time consuming work that's being done within the office. “If you have enough of this data, you can probably infer a certain amount of things,” he explained.

Barnwell used a portion of the session to walk the audience through a proof of concept application called Tagulous, developed by technical, business and legal personnel within Microsoft. True to its name, the application allows users to add a tag within an email or other text-based communications so that unstructured data within can be more easily compiled or identified by subject matter.

Once the data has been curated, it can also be assembled into more digestible formats like a graph or chart. There is, however, still another potential issue waiting to trip up companies looking to make greater use of email-driven data.

Someone in the audience asked how an organization could get people to move beyond the sensation that someone pulling information from the contents of their email was creepy. Barnwell's answer touched on a theme that often pops up in the greater conversation in privacy, thanks largely to the influence of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

“As with most privacy scenarios, I think a lot of it comes down to control and choice,” he said.

In other words, even if an employee's inbox is technically company property, organizations might be wise to construct a system that allows employees to opt in or out of having their emails mined for data.