Aaron Crews, general counsel and vice president of strategy at TextIQ, photographed in the firm's Manhattan office Aug. 30, 2017.

Aaron Crews, Littler Mendelson's chief data analytics officer, is one of the legal industry's few C-suite leaders dedicated exclusively to data analytics. Part of his work has been to expand Littler's pay equity assessment tool, which takes a data-driven approach to conducting pay equity audits for clients. Crews is among the five finalists for the Innovator of the Year Award. The winner will be announced Nov. 6 as part of the California Leaders in Tech Law and Innovation Awards. The Recorder recently asked Crews what it's like to be a pioneering executive in Big Law.

The Recorder: What does it mean to you to be called an innovator?

Aaron Crews: For me, being called an innovator means my team is killing it in terms of thinking broadly about how we can improve the way we service clients and then executing on those items we choose to pursue.

I have the coolest job in the world, because I get to work with amazingly intelligent people who come together to think hard about hard problems. Our most innovative ideas come from a wide range of sources, including clients talking about their pain points, shareholders and associates across the firm who see something we could do better or more of and have a significant positive impact on clients in the process, members of my immediate team who are constantly trying to discern how we can leverage data to better support our lawyers and clients, and peers like my fellow members of the firm's innovation advisory counsel, including Scott Rechtschaffen (our chief knowledge officer), Paul Weiner (our national e-discovery counsel), Scott Forman (founder of Littler CaseSmart), Lori Brown (CEO of our joint venture with Neota Logic, ComplianceHR), Durgesh Sharma (our CIO), Liz Shannon (our head of application development), and others.

Anyone calling me an innovator should know it's this extended team that brings the magic. I'm just blocking and tackling in the execution of these great ideas. Successful innovation takes a village.

You're among the few law firm c-suite leaders focusing on data analytics. Why do you think Littler embraced the role before others? Do you expect more firms to add analytics experts in the C-suite?

Innovation and being ahead of the curve are really written into Littler's DNA. For the last 75 years, the firm has been a place that puts an emphasis on thinking about the future of work generally, and the future of labor and employment law specifically. In this vein, the firm began investing in data analytics initiatives around 2014. By the time I came back to the firm as CDAO in late 2017, those initial investments had grown and matured to the point where we really needed a holistic strategy around them. The firm's investments in the space, coupled with our culture, helped firm leadership see the need for a c-suite position to consolidate and drive strategy in this area.

In light of the fact that "data is eating the world," I fully expect most other firms will have a CDAO or equivalent in the near future. Our clients are dripping in data, and that data is often "the answer to the test" in litigation, as my partner, Don Myers, likes to say. As a result, the ability to analyze and leverage data to benefit clients is a categorical imperative for lawyers going forward.

At a high level, how does Littler's Pay Equity Assessment tool work? Are there other areas where you're hoping to provide a unique client service through data crunching?

We're always looking for ways we can leverage data to provide unique and impactful client services, and we've got several new tools that will be coming out in 2020. Generally speaking, we try to build tools that add rocket fuel to our lawyer's respective practices or directly resolve pain points identified by our clients.

With respect to the Littler Pay Equity Assessment, the tool analyzes data from a client's HRIS to help identify both the existence and cause of pay disparities within a client's organization.

The tool allows us to run a series of regressions on the client's data in real-time and to visualize it in ways that dramatically improve understanding. It helps our internal pay equity subject matter experts, like my partner Denise Visconti, work in real time with clients, in person or via a video conference, to really understand any pay disparities that may exist, what's driving those disparities, and whether they are legally defensible or require remediation.