Entegrata Names Simpson Thacher's Andrew Baker Chief AI Officer

Entegrata has appointed Andrew Baker, formerly Director of Applied AI at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, as Chief AI & Data Strategy Officer, the Indianapolis-based legal data platform said Wednesday. The hire underscores how legal technology vendors are recruiting talent with deep firm-side AI experience as enterprise law firms consolidate fragmented data systems into unified foundations for generative AI.

Baker spent more than five years at the Am Law 10 firm, building applied AI capabilities for legal practice. He previously co-led the Legal Transformation and Innovation Practice at HBR Consulting and founded Seyfarth Shaw's Legal Technology Innovations Office, where he created the "legal solutions architect" role. At Entegrata, his mandate spans engineering, product, and customer experience: help firms structure their content so any model or agent can reason over it accurately, and keep optionality to switch tools without rebuilding the foundation.

Entegrata sells a data lakehouse platform purpose-built for law firms, consolidating matter, operational, and financial data into a single source of truth for reporting and AI applications. Recent customer additions include Cleary Gottlieb, Mayer Brown, Wilson Sonsini, Mintz, and Kilpatrick Townsend. Baker's appointment lands as interest in that platform accelerates, and as firms confront a recurring problem: AI initiatives stall not because of model quality but because underlying firm data remains siloed, ungoverned, or semantically inconsistent. "The firms pulling ahead have realized that a robust data layer is no longer a back-office convenience," Baker said. "It is the enablement framework that their entire AI and data strategy rests upon."

Industry Implications

The hire signals three converging pressures on legal technology. Vendors selling point AI tools face a credibility gap without a credible data story, as buyers increasingly ask how outputs are grounded. The talent flow between Am Law firms and legal tech vendors has accelerated, blurring the line between buyer and builder. And "model agnosticism" is becoming a procurement requirement: firms want the freedom to swap AI providers without rebuilding foundations, favoring platform plays over single-product integrations. Baker is scheduled to appear at ILTACON in Nashville, August 23–27.

DreamLegal Perspective

Legal operations leaders evaluating AI vendors should probe whether the underlying data layer is governed or merely aggregated, and whether semantic context is portable across model providers. Watch for three signals over the next two quarters: whether rival platforms make comparable firm-side hires, whether Entegrata extends into adjacent workflows such as contract lifecycle management, and how competing vendors respond to the model-agnostic pitch that is now table stakes for serious enterprise buyers.