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The intersection of legal expertise and technological innovation represents one of the most exciting frontiers in professional services today. Through our vLex Innovator Q&A Series, we're spotlighting the change-makers who are redefining what's possible in legal practice. By sharing their journeys, challenges, and visions for the future, these conversations provide a roadmap for legal professionals seeking to harness emerging technologies while preserving the essential human elements that define great legal service.

After our interview with Wendy Butler Curtis, we're thrilled to share the third interview in our series with Rachel Shields Williams, Director of Client Intelligence at Sidley Austin LLP. In her role as a senior member of the firm's Data and AI organization, Rachel leads a team responsible for driving strategic data programs related to client intelligence and the data related to clients, matters, and people. With 16 years of experience at Sidley Austin, Rachel has built her career around assessing and anticipating both internal and external customer needs, leveraging cross-industry experience, and implementing operations and technologies that have meaningful, measurable impact on a global scale.

In our conversation with vLex's Chief Strategy Officer, Ed Walters, Rachel discusses her journey from marketing to knowledge management, how AI is transforming legal work, the evolving relationship between law firms and clients, and her predictions for the legal industry in 2025.

Watch the full interview with Rachel Shields Williams.

From Golf Courses to Legal Innovation: A Journey of Service

Rachel's approach to legal innovation has deep roots in her upbringing. Growing up in a family business that owned golf courses, she was instilled with a spirit of service from an early age. "Growing up in the hospitality industry, I was brought up early at a young age for a spirit of service and helping people solve their problems," Rachel explains. This foundation became instrumental in her career at Sidley Austin, where she started as a marketing coordinator in 2009.

"So much of what I do today is about customer service and helping people," Rachel notes. "People don't come to knowledge management because something's easy or they know where it is. They come to us because they've got a problem that they're trying to solve."

Through various roles in business development and marketing, Rachel eventually became deeply involved in experience management as the firm went through a period of rapid growth. Working with Barry Solomon, the then-CMO at Sidley, she became involved in implementing a knowledge management platform for the firm.

What started as a marketing tool has evolved significantly under Rachel's leadership, expanding to serve the entire firm. "Now we support somewhere in the neighborhood of over a thousand users a month. And about 60% of them are practicing lawyers at the firm," Rachel explains. This experience led her to become "deeply rooted in the world of data governance, taxonomy, the value of structured and clean data and cleaning things at the source," ultimately guiding her path to her current role.

How AI Is Transforming Legal Work and Improving Lives

When asked about how AI has changed her role at Sidley, Rachel first acknowledged the personal impact: "Grammarly changed my life. It made writing so much easier." But her vision for AI's potential in the legal industry extends far beyond simple writing assistance.

Rachel sees AI as a tool for enabling legal professionals to focus on their highest value contributions: "It's helping people work smarter and allowing people to really focus on the parts that are people only... helping people to get to that first draft so they can really add that intellectual property that makes them who they are."

Beyond efficiency, Rachel emphasizes how AI can transform work-life balance in the legal profession: "I think it has a really great potential to help people be where they want to be when they want to be there. For some lawyers that might be working with more clients, getting more work. For other lawyers, they might love to do the big high-end work, but they want a better work-life balance because they want to be able to go to their kids' little league games."

In practical terms, Rachel highlights several areas where AI is making significant impacts:

• Advanced data extraction capabilities that transform how information is gathered from documents
• Higher quality APIs that enable more sophisticated integrations across platforms
• Automated handling of routine tasks that previously required manual intervention

These improvements add up to what Rachel calls "a transformative experience" that allows legal professionals to work at their "highest and best use" rather than spending time on tedious tasks like ensuring correct formatting of co-counsel names or manually extracting information that could be automatically processed.

The Evolving Client-Firm Relationship: From Transactions to Partnerships

One of the most significant trends Rachel has observed in her 16-year career is the evolution of the relationship between law firms and in-house counsel. She has witnessed the legal industry's transformation from primarily transaction-focused interactions to a more client-centric approach.

Today, the emphasis has shifted dramatically toward building deeper, more substantive relationships. Rachel notes that becoming a trusted advisor now requires truly understanding the client's business at a fundamental level.

This commitment to understanding clients' businesses is no longer exceptional but becoming standard practice. Rachel herself experienced this evolution firsthand when building out Sidley's energy practice: "I actually went to an energy program at the University of Houston for a week, so I could better understand the industry. So I could better look at our pitches and our proposals to help our lawyers."

The future of client relationships is becoming increasingly data-driven and multidimensional. Rachel highlights how firms are now enhancing traditional client feedback interviews by integrating them with additional data sources for a more comprehensive understanding. She explains that combining direct client feedback with data from enterprise relationship management systems, third-party platforms, and website analytics creates a richer, more nuanced picture of client needs and behaviors. This holistic approach allows firms to develop deeper insights and more tailored service strategies than what could be achieved through any single information channel alone.

Rachel's Predictions for 2025

Looking ahead to 2025, Rachel shared three key predictions for the legal industry:

1. Formalized Data Strategies: "Data governance and data hygiene and data quality is no longer something that is like, 'Oh yeah, we're working on it.' I think we're going to see more firms have formal data strategies that they're taking best practices from other industries like insurance, like banking to really start doing a lot more predictive analytics rather than descriptive analytics that we have a tendency to do a lot of now."
2. Advanced Document Extraction: "I think we're going to see a lot more in the document extraction space. That is something that everyone has been trying to crack and get more out of... The lawyers have a fair point. ‘I wrote it down. Why can't you just take it out of the document? Why do you have to ask me to do it?’ And that's a totally valid point. And I think with the leaps and bounds with the language models, I think that we're going to see a lot more positive space in movement there."
3. Applying AI to the Business of Law: "I think AI is going to continue, generative AI continues to be a big buzzword, but I think we're going to start looking at the business of law. The last couple of years have been very focused on the practice, but the practice is pretty high risk, high reward... whereas the business of law, we're business. You know, there's plenty of places that we can look that have similar challenges. If we get that data organized and we put some rules in place about how we use it, we can really start making transformations in our operations."

Rachel's optimism about the future is clear. When asked if she's concerned about technology putting her out of a job, she responded confidently: "No, I'm just creating more work for myself. There's so many opportunities and there's so many cool, smart people to work with... all that's left is hard problems that are interesting and cool to work on when you can actually solve it and help people achieve their goals."

Looking Forward

Our conversation with Rachel Shields Williams provides valuable insights into how legal knowledge management and client intelligence are evolving in an AI-driven world. Her emphasis on service, data quality, and the transformative potential of technology offers a roadmap for legal professionals looking to navigate the changing landscape.

Rachel's journey from marketing to data and AI leadership demonstrates how diverse experiences can contribute to innovation in legal services. Her predictions for 2025 suggest a future where data strategy, advanced automation, and business-focused AI applications will be central to competitive advantage in the legal industry.

Connect with Rachel on LinkedIn to follow her ongoing work in legal innovation.

Stay tuned for our next interview in the vLex Innovator Q&A Series, where we'll speak with Kenton Brice, Director of the Law Library and Associate Professor of Law, to continue exploring the frontiers of legal innovation.

Authored By

Jeff Cox