Entegrata has hired Andrew Baker as chief AI & data strategy officer, bringing on board one of the legal sector’s most experienced AI practitioners as it expands its ambitions beyond just data infrastructure and into AI enablement.
Baker joins from Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, where he served as director of applied AI and built a team of around 20 specialists focused on the firm’s AI and innovation strategy. During his time at the Am Law 10 firm, Baker helped drive the adoption of leading generative AI platforms including Harvey and DeepJudge and gained firsthand experience of the opportunities and limitations firms face as they scale AI across the enterprise.
Baker’s roles over the years include global director for legal product and technology at Seyfarth Shaw, director of legal transformation at Janders Dean, VP and global head of services at LexPredict, and a senior director at HBR.
This latest appointment coincides with Entegrata’s plans to launch a new AI enablement layer built on top of its existing data lakehouse platform. Rather than creating another legal AI application, the company says its focus is on helping firms establish the data foundations required to support multiple AI tools, models and internally developed applications.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Entegrata founder and chief executive Tom Baldwin said the market’s biggest challenge is no longer a shortage of AI tools.
“Firms don’t need another AI tool,” he said. “It is the layer beneath all these tools that gives firms more content, context, cost control and choice. Firms want more freedom to pick different models and not be locked into any one vendor as the market changes.”
According to Baldwin, law firms are increasingly concerned about preserving institutional knowledge and maintaining flexibility as AI models evolve rapidly. Entegrata’s new offering is designed to provide a single source of truth for firm knowledge that can sit underneath platforms such as Harvey, Legora, CoCounsel and future AI applications, allowing firms to switch between models without losing context, expertise or control over their data.
For Baker, the move reflects a broader shift taking place across the legal sector. After two years of intense experimentation with generative AI, firms are now turning their attention to what sits underneath the technology.
Baker said. “The question is how do you begin to capitalise on what’s happening across different platforms and bring it together in the right way.”
He argues that the industry is entering a new phase where data readiness, governance and software development capability will become just as important as selecting the right AI tools.
“We’re expecting to see a big swing toward custom development and much more software engineering in the market,” Baker said. “Regardless of how that happens, you need the right kind of data layer below that to support more creative uses of generative AI.”
That view reflects a growing trend among leading firms, many of which are now exploring whether competitive advantage will come not from deploying the same AI platforms as their peers, but from building proprietary workflows, products and client-facing solutions on top of them.
While legal AI vendors continue to compete aggressively, firms are increasingly aware that today’s leading products may not be tomorrow’s winners.
Baker says: “The economics of building and supporting custom software development have changed dramatically,” he said. “Every firm is looking for an experience beyond the four corners of Harvey, beyond the four corners of Legora. Right now there is a bit of a sea of sameness.”
Firms are looking to create differentiated experiences, whether for internal knowledge delivery, client service, pricing innovation or entirely new product offerings. But doing so requires access to well-governed, structured and unstructured data that can be reused consistently across multiple AI systems.
Entegrata’s answer is to provide what Entegrata’s founder Tom Baldwin describes as the “plumbing layer”, enabling firms to focus on building products and solutions rather than spending months assembling data infrastructure. The company says this will help firms accelerate AI initiatives while retaining greater control over costs, governance and model selection.
One area likely to become increasingly important is model routing, where firms direct different tasks to different AI models according to cost, capability and risk. Baker argues that making those decisions effectively requires deep contextual understanding of firm data and workflows.
Looking ahead, Baker’s role will encompass product architecture, advising firms on AI team development and supporting broader data strategy initiatives. More fundamentally, however, his appointment signals Entegrata’s belief that the next phase of legal AI will be won not by the firms with the most tools, but by those with the strongest foundations.
