Mary Cooper on Client Service, Asking Better Questions and Active Listening

Tell us a little bit about your eDiscovery career, where you've come from and what you do today. I actually graduated from law school at UMKC School of Law. So that was my old stomping grounds over there where I was at. Haven't been there since law school, so maybe intentionally, but graduated from law school in 2008, which as we all can kind of remember, there's like a small recession going on at that point. And so I had funny thing as I really had always wanted to go to law school. I've got two degrees, one in sociology and one in criminology, and I wanted to be in the FBI. And I graduated from law school and I took the tests to like go to be in the FBI like a couple of weeks after I graduated.

And I was sitting in this huge room in the Kansas City's FBI offices surrounded by like, you know, men with military haircuts. And I was like, oh, maybe this is my like, I'm in the right spot. And I took the test and they pretty much were just like, you will like you can come to the FBI and work for us, but you will never live in Kansas City because it's a highly coveted like post in the FBI. I think it's just like really easy to probably to just come and work in this office. And so they were like, the list is like 100 years long of all the tenured people that want to come. So just we just want to warn you that like, if you wanted to stay here and work in your hometown, that's never going to be an option.

And I had just been married at the time and wanted to have a bunch of kids and I'm super close to my family. So I was like, OK, I'm not going to be in the FBI. And so now what am I going to do with my life? And so a buddy of mine was working at a firm and he was like, come do there's this thing called doc review and you can come like review documents. Like, and you just do that for a while until you kind of decide what firm you want to night clerked and done a bunch of clerkships and stuff. And we're still kind of figuring out where I wanted to practice. And so I did doc review and then here I am like almost 15 and now 15, 16 years later and have a long career and a discovery.

And so I worked at Shook, Hardy & Bacon for about seven years in their discovery practice. And then I went from Shook to my now company, UnitedLex, and I have been there for 10 years and have probably held 10 titles in those 10 years, you know, how the market goes. And so that's kind of my just my background of how I how I made it to rhyme up.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I wanted to go down the path of law school, but I never really was super into like being a litigator, which is but I'm a people like very extroverted and a people person. And so everybody always finds that hilarious because they're like, you know, you'd be a great litigator. And I'm like, yeah, I don't know if that was like my path. But you know, you go into law school and it's just like, that's kind of what's, like that's the expectation. Like you're gonna go and you're gonna be in court. You're gonna like litigate stuff or at least like, you know, in some aspect of the courtroom. And that just never, never excited me. And like I said, I have both a criminology and a sociology degree and DFBI fascinated me.

And this is back like early 2000s, again, I'm aging myself where like, you know, all the shows on TV were like law and order and like all the cool like criminal shows, you know, I think just an aspect of that was an area and an industry that I really wanted to become a part of. But I mean, here I am now 15 years later in an entire niche industry, I feel like eDiscovery is sort of still when I just, when people say like, oh, what do you do? I almost brought, I almost brought of like, oh, I'm like, I don't even, let's just, you have 20 minutes because like I will explain it to you if you have 20 minutes. But it's such a cool, like really cool niche area of the law and of legal that is so, I feel like different but adjacent to, you know, litigation and investigations and, you know, all of the rest of like what legal departments are faced with.

And I'm also kind of a tech nerd. Like I love Call of Duty and like, I just like, I love playing video games with my fortune also. And so I've always kind of been a little bit of a tech nerd. And so I found this area of law very interesting. And I don't know about you guys or the listeners or anybody else, but I feel like if you get into one of those jobs, complacency has never been my forte. If I'm not kind of constantly challenged or evolving as a person, I am like getting bored. And so this is a really great industry for those of us that are like driving that high of always being challenged. And so I'm glad I ended up in it.

Now if I were an FBI agent, that would be super cool, but I'm not. So here we are. Nice.

That's a really good question. So I will give you one of my cheats. So one of my cheats is the phrase, I love this phrase. I made it up myself. So let's like, everyone knows it came here, started here first. Now, one of my phrases is I don't chase titles, I chase problems because I feel like when you put the customer first and in this industry you have to do that, right? Because every customer has such unique needs. You're using a lot of the same problems and the same technology and the same processes, but with the ultimate goal is very different. And so I have probably had 10 different titles in the 10 years that I've been with my current company, but I've always chased new problems in those titles and I feel like that's almost a daily thing with me, that I always want to chase a problem so that I can help to solve that problem.

And that's probably a better way to describe each role that I had. I will say that early on in, you know, I think it was maybe 2016, I got my PMP. So I came in as a, again, an attorney by background, but came in and got my PMP because I could really see the value of project management and the skill sets and that was a hard exam. I mean, I've taken a bar exam and like it was hard, but I have used the knowledge that I gained in that PMP every day for my entire career. And I feel like when you look at things as a project manager and that you are here to manage a project to solve a problem, everything becomes easy, right?

It's like you're just connecting dots or you're connecting people or you're connecting sources or whatever it might be. And so like for me over those, you know, 10, 15 years, it's never been, it's never, I don't chase titles, I chase problems for sure. We're gonna have to find a listener who is a USPTO, an IP lawyer, we'll get a TM associated with that or yeah, et cetera. I got it.

No, no, no, that's a really good question. So I'd say it's always my goal, and I've worked directly with the clients for 10 years. It's my sweet spot. I love working with the clients. That is probably where I will continue my career path. But when we talk about truly being the voice of customer and keeping the clients first, that I train younger teams this, that doesn't mean that you just say yes. Like the client actually isn't always right because they don't always understand or know enough about the capabilities of the technology or the implications of the decisions that they are making in the technology. It is absolutely our jobs to understand and know enough and be the experts and bring our experience to the table to say, yes, but right, or no and or whatever it is.

A client might ask like, hey, I wanna produce, or I wanna process 300 gigs in the next two weeks. And my first question is why? Right? I mean, sure we can do that, but what's two weeks? Like what are you getting to in two weeks? Well, we really wanna find key critical information and I've got two weeks to show whatever report to my boss or I've got two weeks from now we have a hearing or whatever it may be. It's like, all right, well then there's a very different way that we're gonna do this than it would be a traditional linear review. We're gonna use X technology or whatever it might be. Oh, and our budget's really tight. Yeah, whatever, all right, well, then we're gonna go this route first.

And if that doesn't work, we'll know that we have to take stage two. And so I feel like in all aspects of technology, it is very much the understanding of that technology and the impact on client decisions that has to drive from the very beginning of that project, if that makes any sense.

No, that's a good question, Brandon. I think it's top, depends on the client, right? Depends on the problem itself. My dad, an old farmer would say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And sometimes I use that term with clients. So just like, yeah, you know, like somebody gave you a shiny thing, but we don't necessarily need to do anything with the shiny thing right now because this other thing is working just fine. We just need to make some tweaks. Sometimes the problem in and of itself or the client's ultimate goal requires a deeper assessment. So we'll do like an early case assessment in some aspect, but at more of a strategic consulting level I would say where we sit down and go, we're gonna assess across your legal department or we're gonna assess across all of litigation.

What technology do you have? Who do you have running it? Where are your pain points? Where can we create some strategy and some efficiency? And then if those things and those recommendations don't solve your problem, we'll talk about how to use other technology or use your vendors in a smarter way. But I would say it really depends on the problem. And that's why again, like I told you, Daniel, that like asking great questions is like, if I could rate our resume that just didn't have anything, but like what I'm like cool stuff I'm really good at, it would be like asking great questions. active listening. Like, you know, it's like, like, like, the stuff that really matters in the end whenever you're, you know, doing this type of table work with your clients.

All right. Well, you hit on a topic, obviously, that I'm, that I'm super passionate about. We talked about in the, in the, in the pre-call here. And I want to dig into this.

Yeah. No, that's a good one. So and I get that a lot because I think it's you described it as an art accurately, right? It is an art and not a science. And often art comes from just a lot of practice over and over and over again. Right? How many paintings? Like Picasso, like just a lot, right? Like a gazillion. Like it's just, it's just an art that has to kind of come from a lot of practice. I think also recognizing if you're the type of person that is just waiting for the other person to stop talking so that you can interject with whatever you want to say next. You didn't pay attention to what they were saying, right? And I can always see it in the conversations.

I tend to be and I just have kind of learned how my brain works over my career. I tend to be like my brain was a computer. I process information very quickly, which works really well. When you work with clients and you have a lot of client meetings and I do a lot of consulting, a lot of onboarding of new clients, I have almost no memory. Like my ram is just empty. And so I will be an interrupter because I think my brain is processing very quick and I want to interrupt the conversation so that I can better understand. It's like, I can't move forward until I understand this concept better. And so I've learned, you know, that other people would like to finish their sentence.

And so I stop interrupting, but that means I have learned to really write things down. So if I'm active listening and I come up with a thought or I come up with a question, I always have a notepad in front of me and I am taking notes all day long every day and every conversation. Most of them I never look at it again, right? Or maybe like 15 minutes later or whenever it's a good time to pause and come back to that question, I will use it. But so that's one like simple thing that I would recommend, you know, to, you know, a younger me is to just really active listen. But instead of letting my brain go to 100 places, write it down, leave it on the piece of paper, get back into the conversation.

I also don't know if it's a generational thing or not, but I'm very comfortable on the phone and getting on calls. Like I'll just be like, let's jump on a call. That tends to not be the first place that a lot of new young lawyers go to or new young employees go to. They lived in the Twitter generation, right? It's just like they want to just stay in email or stay in those chat messaging. And I try to encourage folks like just to get on a quick call because so much of that active listening and that communication and the working through the problem can happen faster, better, cheaper. I mean, billable hours are, you know, it can happen so much easier if you're just getting on a call.

And then when you're on the call, sure, have an agenda, but don't be afraid to sort of like, hey, I've got I'm a little bit confused. Can we back up or have questions? I think people are kind of a talker. Can you tell? I think people are quick to think like I'll be judged if I ask a question or I maybe will look like I don't know what I'm doing. If I'm confused and need the client to repeat themselves, I'm like, no, I almost feel like it's the opposite. Like I bring on all the questions, like let's talk through it, right? That to me, that's a sign that they are truly active listening and processing the information. So those are just some tips, I guess, that I would say would lead you to be a better active listener.

And in all things, I practice active listening with my friends and my family and my kid, right? Like when we sit down and talk about his day, I'm truly active listening to his day and I'm interacting with him. and asking detailed questions. And I think if you practice it in that manner, it will come more naturally.

No, that's good. I think it again goes back to that overall goal. Your KPIs are gonna be driven by the client's needs. If it's, if the goal of the client is some sort of spend reduction, one of your KPIs is gonna be heavily dependent on right the spend, the cost savings. Sometimes it's not cost savings, it's cost reallocation where a client is like, I don't wanna save them. I don't wanna have a lower budget next year, right? Like I don't wanna save a bunch of money. I want to just simply spend it in a different area. And so then it's really telling the story through the metrics. And I feel like eDiscovery, especially as an industry is just, it is metrics driven. The data tells the story, but there's a lot of different metrics that can tell a different story.

And so we do a lot of reporting. There's a ton of reporting, matter level reporting, portfolio level reporting, whether that's spend, whether that's data metrics, whether that's technology based reporting. It tells the story that the client wants to hear. And so that can be a big success factor from a KPIs standpoint. Sometimes it's not cost, sometimes it's risk, right? It's a high risk matter. Maybe it's an S&C investigation or something where it's like, not that budget doesn't matter, not that it's a blank check, but it's much more about risk. And you're gonna use different technology and we're gonna recommend different processes and different tech in order to make sure that we've reduced that risk as much as possible. And that the reporting going out to the client shows the value of that risk reduction and really shows like, hey, the quality control procedures, here's what you're getting, here's all the visibility and reduces that risk overall.

Those are just some examples that I can pick up.

Yeah, that's good. So you, a lot of trust, a lot of accountability, right? Trust but verify, the age old phrase, right? Trust but verify. We have UnitedLex based best practices and standards that we adhere to based on industry standards as well as our own recommendations for client. And sometimes those are based on industry, the financial industry, we would have recommended metrics that we provide to banks or other financial institutions based on we know that you are a high risk industry, maybe. And so these are the types of things that we will report out and then we can customize based on client needs. And that can be a really way to say like, hey, we've learned from other clients, we've built this standard but let's customize this based on whatever your overall goals and needs are.

So yeah, I mean, I think it just, it kind of depends on the client and the reporting itself but that's kind of how we do some of it. It's tough because it's hard not to micromanage especially when things go wrong, right? Like the client's calling me and I'm just like, okay, where are you going on? Deep, but it's like we can get there. And like having that, being the voice of customer to me, to me means not only feeding the customer's voice into our internal operations delivery or sales organizations or whatever it might be but also being the voice of the company to. the client. So you're setting proper client expectations. Like clients can have really crazy expectations about timelines or budget or what it might be.

And that's part of that educating, right? I'm going to educate you about this process client, or I'm going to talk to you about why we recommend doing it this way or why this is the best practice so that the client then understands and has less of an expectation of, you know, something going wrong straight out the gate. So that voice of customer to me feeds in as well as goes out to really protect the standards that we've developed.

Yeah, that's good. I would say overall legal in and of itself has been, I would say, I don't want silo may not be the right word to use, but it's silo, right? IP works on IP and they stick with IP and they know IP and they don't really want to talk about anything else, right? Because it's just like we're IP lords. Lit is just like we deal with lit and anything else like work on out. And then you might have a whole contracting group who just like is getting bombarded with 100 contracts a day that they have to read and they're just like this is getting out of control. And well, the success that we have found as an ALSP like who provides legal services across the entire legal department is looking at it at such a satellite view that we can say what you're learning over here, we need to apply over here.

Or if you've got technology over here that you know IP lit is like the IP organization is using this technology and it's really benefiting their cases and their case management and outside council management, whatever it is, or they've got a team that's been really successful in this. Where else can we apply this in a more broad manner across the legal department? So we've really had a lot of success tackling it at more of a legal level, unless at an individual service or individual business level. It's harder to do that in more like in a law firm space just because every partner kind of has you know their own budget and their own team and their own needs. But corporate clients for sure we're seeing a ton of success at looking at things at a higher level.

From a technology aspect especially, my clients are being bombarded with the rest of the business, the rest of the corporation just like using every new technology on the market or hey there's this new AI or hey there's a new chat function and we're like okay but there's there might be things in that chat in that ephemeral message in that chat messaging that has to be collected for litigation right? It has to be perfect preserved. If every time the business uses a new chat function or you know each different part of the business uses its own, we have to think through the downstream effects and the risks associated with that and how it affects you know the rest of legal. So these are just the types of conversations that we're having with clients that have led to a lot of success on not only reducing overall cost but burden and efficiencies, making legal cost center instead of just a drain on the rest of the business is a goal and it has to be a goal moving forward.

Technology is moving so quickly that we have to think about it that way or else it'll just get out of control at some point especially with AI.

I will be there yes.

Yeah I think over the years we've had a lot of great parts. with various corporate law firm clients. And NeLI being one of those conferences that at least to us as a gold partner that really gets to the heart of the issues. We've all been to those conferences, right? Where you sit in on the meetings and it's like, we're gonna talk about AI, but we really just say AI like 100 times and then we all leave, right? It's like, we wanna put our money where our mouth is in the type of conference that is gonna truly drill down into these issues to again, back to solving problems, which is the heart of everything in my opinion, to solve clients problems and connect people who can do that.

And so UnitedLex wants to be a part of that and wants to partner with NeLI to make sure that anybody attending this conference feels like it's valuable and productive and that you're meeting with either service providers or other law departments or other people just in the industry, in the space who really wanna get down and solve future problems. And I think this conference is a great way to be able to do that.

I'm excited. Thanks, all. Thank you so much for having me.