Entegrata raised $4.5 million in seed funding<\/a>, Baldwin \u2014 the former CIO or CKO at firms including Cadwalader, Reed Smith and Sheppard Mullin \u2014 founded the company in 2023 to address the fragmentation of law firm data across dozens of business systems, consolidating it within a purpose-built data lakehouse.<\/p>\nWith Baker\u2019s hire, the company is extending that mission from business intelligence into the data layer that underpins firm-wide AI.<\/p>\n
A Reunion Two Decades in the Making<\/h3>\n
For Baldwin and Baker, the hire is something of a reunion. The two worked together at Reed Smith in the early 2010s, when Baldwin was running pricing, legal project management and other functions there and, as he tells it, went looking for \u201ca unicorn in the form of a JD black belt\u201d in process improvement, and found Baker\u2019s profile on LinkedIn.<\/p>\n
Baker later returned to Seyfarth Shaw, where he had previously worked, to help launch that firm\u2019s innovation program. There, he founded what Entegrata says was the industry\u2019s first legal technology innovations office and pioneered the legal solutions architect role.<\/p>\n
He went on to co-lead the legal transformation and innovation practice at HBR Consulting (now Harbor) before joining Simpson Thacher, where he has spent the last five-and-a-half years advancing the firm\u2019s use of data science and emerging technology. Along the way, he earned a master\u2019s degree in applied data science.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been hunkered down at this intersection of law, data, tech and strategy for quite some time,\u201d Baker said.<\/p>\n
So why leave what he called \u201cprobably one of the cooler jobs in a law firm that you could ask for\u201d to join a vendor?<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really about the opportunity to build something big and lasting in the industry,\u201d Baker said. \u201cI spent a lot of time in pretty much every vendor tool that\u2019s out there, a lot of time working with teams to build custom solutions within our firm, and I feel like I have a pretty clear understanding of where the hard edges are on each of those. And we keep running into the same challenges over and over.\u201d<\/p>\n
Solving those challenges from inside a single firm is daunting, he said, but it is a different ballgame from the outside.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you think about where you want to put your time and energy if you\u2019re doing technical work in a law firm, it\u2019s not on the plumbing and the data ecosystem,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s building the cool, exciting, creative things.\u201d<\/p>\n
What \u2018AI Enablement\u2019 Means<\/h3>\n
In his new role, Baker will own Entegrata\u2019s AI roadmap across engineering, product and customer experience, with his central focus on a new product line the company describes as AI enablement.<\/p>\n
To date, Baker said, Entegrata has been adjacent to the AI story \u2014 its data could be put to creative use, but AI was one step removed from the core product.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis next chapter in the book brings Entegrata straight to the coalface on everything AI-related,\u201d he said. Whatever firms are pursuing \u2014 model routing, autonomous agents, custom development \u2014 \u201cnone of those can be executed very well without the right kind of content or context to make that happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
The goal, he said, is \u201cproviding a framework and layer to help people truly do that, and moving beyond theory into pragmatism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baldwin says the product vision centers around what he calls the four Cs: content, context, cost control and choice. The idea is to give AI tools richer content and context drawn from across a firm\u2019s systems, provide firms observability into AI costs, and preserve their ability to swap in new models and tools as the market shifts, without starting over each time.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo be clear, we are not building yet another AI model or product,\u201d Baldwin said. \u201cWe\u2019re enabling deeper context and giving more content to the existing tools firms have\u201d \u2014 he named Harvey, Legora and Deep Judge as examples \u2014 \u201cand creating that downstream off-ramp to different tools as they become available.\u201d<\/p>\n
Central to the effort is an ontology for legal data that the company is currently building, layered on top of a schema that Baldwin said already contains some 5,000 fields. (When I wrote about the company last year, that schema had 3,500 fields.)<\/p>\n
The ontology is designed to capture the full web of relationships within a firm \u2014 the \u201c360-degree view\u201d that connects a document to a timekeeper, the timekeeper to a matter, the matter to a client, and outward to industry, jurisdiction, judge and opposing counsel.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou lose all of that context the minute you take a document out of the DMS and manually upload it into an AI tool,\u201d Baldwin said. \u201cWe bring that all back and throw an ontology on top of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
He drew a comparison to the much-discussed partnership between Kirkland & Ellis and Palantir. \u201cLong term, this is going to be an offering that\u2019s going to feel very Kirkland-esque in terms of the capabilities, but at a fraction of the time and cost that it\u2019ll take to implement something like Palantir.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Data Layer as the Bottleneck<\/h3>\n
Both men agree that the data layer has become the choke point for firms trying to move beyond their first wave of generative AI deployments.<\/p>\n
In the early rush, Baldwin said, firms were under enormous pressure simply to get AI up and running, in part so they could say they were using it.<\/p>\n
Now that firms have had time to settle into it, he said, the next stage of maturity is \u201cmoving beyond the disconnected download-documents-out-of-the-DM, upload-them-manually-into-an-AI-tool\u201d workflow toward AI that can run on the firm\u2019s full data estate. He said the last six firms Entegrata signed all characterized their moves as being about AI readiness and enablement.<\/p>\n
The challenge for law firms, Baldwin said, differs from other industries. \u201cThe challenge isn\u2019t in depth and speed. We don\u2019t have petabytes of real-time streaming from one or two ERP sources. Our challenge is width. It\u2019s stitching together data from 20 or 30 systems.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baker made a similar point about leading practice-of-law AI platforms. \u201cThe Harveys and Legoras of the world are fantastic for helping firms move quickly,\u201d he said. \u201cThe challenge you run into is that they all have hard edges.\u201d Firms whose practices do not fit neatly within those boundaries \u2014 or that want to rethink a practice\u2019s economics or go-to-market approach \u2014 quickly find themselves breaking through them.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight now, there are a number of solutions that are focused on retrieval, and some of them do a really good job,\u201d Baker said. \u201cBut that next hop over \u2014 how do we analyze, synthesize and create anew \u2014 it\u2019s hard to get the data in the right structure for that. And we think we can do that in a way that others really can\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
As an example of what this can mean for customers, Baldwin said that for one of its largest customers, a 2,000-lawyer firm, Entegrata is building an AI tool for just three people in firm leadership designed to answer the questions that, as he put it, the people who sign everyone\u2019s checks care about.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the opposite of, \u2018I\u2019m a third-year associate grinding through this asset purchase agreement draft,’\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s, \u2018I\u2019m the chair of the firm and I want to know directionally where the firm\u2019s headed.’\u201d<\/p>\n
Baker\u2019s Remit<\/h3>\n
Baldwin described Baker\u2019s mandate as spanning three buckets. First and foremost is architecting the new AI enablement product line. Second, with law firms increasingly hiring for net-new data and AI leadership roles, Baker will offer his playbook as a service to firms just standing up applied AI functions \u2014 drawing on his consulting experience at Harbor in making what works at one firm portable to many. Third, he will take over much of the data strategy engagement work that Baldwin has been leading himself.<\/p>\n
\u201cAndrew has lived this problem from inside one of the most prestigious firms on the planet, so he knows what it takes to make AI dependable across a real practice,\u201d Baldwin said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHis mandate is simple: prepare firm data and context so any model or tool it chooses actually delivers. That is the layer most of the industry is still missing, and it is what Andrew will build for our clients.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baker will be at ILTACON in Nashville, Aug. 23-27, where he hopes to meet with firms to discuss the intersection of data strategy and AI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The legal data company Entegrata, whose data lakehouse platform helps law firms consolidate siloed data into a single source of truth, has hired Andrew Baker, who for more than five years led applied AI and data science at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, as its first chief AI and data strategy officer, where he will lead […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":157898,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-157897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawsite"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xira.com\/p\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/ChatGPT-Image-Jul-22-2026-01_18_21-PM-1024x576-kDrM4V.png?fit=1024%2C576&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157897\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}