Today’s guest is Carmin Ballou, vice president of Data Analytics and Innovation at Attorneys' Liability Assurance Society, also known as ALAS. ALAS is the country’s largest lawyer-owned mutual, insuring 223 law firms—including 89 of the Am Law 200—with more than 74,000 lawyers located around the world. A lawyer with a Master of Science in Analytics degree from the University of Chicago Graham School, Carmin is focused on a key element of the legal profession: risk management. She uses her legal background and technical skills to lead the data analytics team at ALAS, with a goal of instilling more robust risk management-based analytics across all functional areas of ALAS, and providing analysis and tools for use of their member firms. The analytics initiatives are designed to assist in ALAS' ongoing operations, and to provide a service to ALAS' member firms by helping them understand and manage their professional liability risk. To this work, she brings many years of experience as a practicing attorney at Skadden, as well as expertise in machine learning, natural language processing, SQL, Python, and Power BI.

Listen in to today’s conversation to learn how Carmin's team uses data to test and support the experiences of her loss prevention colleagues. We also talk about the use of data visualization techniques to help communicate the messages learned from the data as to a firm’s area with the most issues. And of course, we talk about her professional journey and how her interest in project management and data analytics instructed her personal path.