Speakers

Making Unstructured Data a Strategic Advantage: Lessons from Firms That Get It Right

Law firms have been fighting unstructured data sprawl for decades, but the problem has evolved from “storage hygiene” to business, security and compliance risk and now AI risk and opportunity. In this session, ActiveNav Founder and CEO, Peter Baumann, traces how we got here, unpacks the three most common cleanup strategies law firms rely on (and why they consistently stall), and outlines the operating model used by firms that stay in control.

Key Learnings

1. Why we’re at a tipping-point moment: unstructured data sprawl + collaboration platforms + legacy content have made cleanup temporary fixes, at best and add friction to AI. 
2. Why the standard playbooks fail: the three most common approaches create short-term progress but don’t change the conditions that recreate the mess. 
3. What successful firms do differently: they shift from episodic projects to a repeatable operating model: visibility, ownership, governance that scales, and defensible decisions that stick. 
4. What “AI readiness” really looks like: how the firms that win start with discoverability, classification, continuous governance, and the right tools for the job.

About Peter

Peter Baumann has spent more than two decades looking honestly at what's hiding inside an organisation's data. As CEO of ActiveNav, he leads a team that helps some of the world's largest law firms, financial institutions, and regulated businesses find, classify, and govern the unstructured data they've been accumulating for years. In most cases, it became a liability long before anyone thought to look.

ActiveNav operates across the United States, United Kingdom, and Asia-Pacific, working where the stakes around data privacy, compliance, and AI readiness are highest. Peter has sat across the table from general counsels, CISOs, and compliance officers at the moment a breach, a regulatory demand, or an AI initiative forces them to confront how little they actually know about their own information.

His perspective is direct, practical, and grounded in what it actually takes to govern a large data estate. He speaks on information governance, legal technology, and the AI readiness gap and why most organisations are less prepared than they believe.