Innovation in Litigation Support

Great to be here. Great to, you know, be with you and, and Jared in this and, happy to share whatever information we can draw out of today's conversation. Well, we're gonna draw out a lot out of you, Chris. So for all of our listeners, Chris is the director of legal technology at, Troutman Pepper and Troutman Pepper eMerge.

Great. How much time do we have? Because, that's a pretty open ended question there. I'm pretty old.

Awesome. Awesome. Great. Well, I think the logical place for me to start is probably for most people is how I got into the legal technology space.

You know, I've I've been doing this now for over twenty five years. I and probably like most people, I had no idea what that this industry even existed before I joined it. And in the nineties, certainly this industry wasn't what it is today. But I started on the for us, eDiscovery nerds. I started on the right side of the EDRM.

I, I was in video prior to the legal industry, and I had a client that, needed video depositions at He would always call me on a Friday night, bring over some beers, and we would sit and edit some video depositions together to play in trial the next week and he would he did graphics for attorneys. And, in the nineties, it was really when the evolution and start of trial presentation technology trial director and software called sanction. We're coming into play and they're using projectors, computers, and courtrooms. And so we for we joined together our businesses and form trial exhibits.

And so I started as a trial presentation hot seat operator. In the courtrooms all over the country. And it really gave me a very different perspective on what I do today. Because as a non attorney, I don't I don't necessarily have the legal training and I haven't been in a courtroom arguing cases before.

But I've seen the world's leading experts and cross examinations and evidentiary objections And so it really has informed my career from those earliest days on the right side of how we do things and how I've managed teams and managed organizations on the left side of the EDRM to make sure that we're preparing for the right side. So I did that for several years, jury consulting and helping pick juries and helping, consult, and prep witnesses and those types of things mock trials. That was a lot of travel and a lot of long hours, lots of nights and weekends.

And so we wanted to grow our family, and I wanted to settle down a bit more and travel a little less transitioning to technology in the early two thousands, in the left side of things.

Seemed to make a lot of sense, and I was just frankly fortunate and lucky that that was about the same time that this thing we call you discovery today. Really took off in two thousand four, two thousand five. So I was on the ground floor of that exciting time in our industry. I went to work at a couple different law firms over that time.

And, and even went back and had my own business for a while. But I've been at troutman now for, twelve years.

And it's been a great journey here. And for a lot of reasons, you mentioned we have the subsidiary emerge And that has just been, a tremendous opportunity and amazing vision that our firm had to make that possible and all of the great things that have come from it. We can, you know, dig into that more.

Yeah. Well, first of all, I love technology. I love new. I love innovating.

So it's natural that I'm going to want to pursue, anything that's cool and innovative.

And if I can find a good enough reason to get our firm to invest in it. Right? Because it's gonna make a difference. It's gonna be a game changer gonna allow us to be better, more efficient, reduce risk, then those are all things that I can latch on to and push push forward.

But to answer your question d directly, it's it frankly, you give me a lot more credit than probably I deserve. It's to me, it was just common sense. When I started at the firm, we were tracking the work we were doing on Excel spreadsheets when I would ask whether or not we were making any money or whether or not we were productive or or all these myriad of things that you would want to know in knowing what as a manager or a director and running a business The answer was often either we don't know. We don't track it or we have this Excel spreadsheet.

And and those weren't good enough for me. Right? So I wanted some organization, some structure. We were advising our clients about the importance of documentation and process and eDiscovery and so you could avoid process failures And how could we preach that if we weren't doing it ourselves?

So we needed to develop, systems and muscles to be able to track and evaluate and measure our what we were doing, how we were doing it, the success of what we were doing it, and to make sure that we were, validating the results and not missing things. And, you know, there was a lot of decisions coming out around that time about you know, missing custodians and not collecting data that we thought was being collected. And if you look at the case law back and around that the late you know, two thousand eight, two thousand nine, two thousand ten era when the time you're talking about, it was all about process failures and lack of documentation.

And so we really poured into that, as we started, and I joined troutman and we started emerge into how can we lay that foundation that will permeate through our organization to ensure that we're providing the best service and not and at a high quality So we build out a custom project management application that tracks these things. We synchronized it, with Relativity so that as decisions and coding decisions and other work was being done in Relativity. It was automatically, synchronizing to tables in our project management application and presenting that information in an easy to understand way on a on a dashboard.

And so we were we spent, you know, I think it sounds like it was probably pretty much easier than it was. It's thousands of hours and a labor of love, but in fact, we call it project elephant now because it's so big that we have to track it and you can't just eat it in one bite that that every day, there's things that we have to do and what used to be quick and nimble. The the applications grown so large and track so much that It takes, a major, project to, to make changes now. It sounds like it was a really big organizational change and probably there was cultural shift with that as well.

Yeah. I think that's where our firm was ahead of its time, frankly. I think there's a couple of others that have that have groups that are similar to ours, but not in organized in the same way. When I started, we were a traditional litigation support group within a law firm.

And I think, my boss, Allison Brown, managing partner, and emerge today.

The leadership at the firm, that all the way up to the managing partner of the firm recognized that what we were doing in litigation support wasn't working. The traditional model wasn't working. We weren't revenue generating. We didn't have money to invest in training and the best technology and those kinds of things. And so we needed to change the way that we looked at how we did lift support. And so the ultimate We did a bunch of business plan and thinking. We ultimately formed a separate subsidiary named Emerge.

And And so that was really what drove a lot of this change back to your change management question is that we were doing it different. We we have started from a place of what we're doing isn't working. We need something different.

And so we wanted to make a significant and in the technology and in how we do things. And that's what led us down this path of change and change adoption A lot of the, the lit support regime that had been in place for years at the firm, turned over, frankly, after I was here. So We, you know, I'm we were able to hire a lot of, of new talent and, and innovative minds to join our team that could drive, this change that we wanted and help us to get there. Daniel mentioned managed services earlier and that was a key component of this too is that we weren't out to take over the world or try to do everything ourselves either. We recognize that we needed help in this journey.

And having someone that could help us, along the way in that journey was critical to our success especially in the early years of having someone that could help us manage our infrastructure someone that we could learn from their existing guides and checklists and all of the things necessary because it's not just have so many clients that call me up and say, Chris, what legal hold software should I buy? I'm like, well, technology and there's a lot of different choices you could make there and There are pros and cons and one's always better than another and that will frankly change every year. But you have to look at the whole picture. It's not just the technology. It's the people and the process who's gonna do it? How are you gonna do it? And if you don't have all three of those pieces that come together, then you're really gonna have trouble.

And so you just buying technology is not enough. And so having a managed service, arrangement with someone who could help us with overflow on the people side and share with us and guide us in the process.

Was so critical. We we both probably offer that to our clients now at our existing companies. And so that that's something that a lot of our clients find of value from us today as we've now reciprocated. I mean, we're we're a managed service provider for our clients.

But I think first of all, let me start by saying we measure value two ways. We measure value internally in the way that we operate and the way that we deliver services, but we also measure value so that we can help clients understand the value of what they're deriving from our services. You know, we all work in an industry where there's not a product Right? At the end of at the end of a good eDiscovery matter, in fact, there's there should be no extra There should be nothing that's delivered.

Right? There's no that there's you're not gonna get a shiny red corvette with, you know, you're not picking up. When you buy eDiscovery services, you don't come away with a product that everyone loves. In fact, if we do a good job, you don't think about us anymore.

Right? That's that's the goal. And so we have to have other ways and more creative ways to measure value for our clients, but I'll come back to that. To your earlier point, though, on the internal measure measuring of value, One, if you just, again, the common sense tells you that I have to have a way to measure, are we doing a good job?

And at the pace of change in the, you know, in our in our world, not the technology changes every day. The law changes every day. In our cases change every day. Right?

Our clients change all the time too. And so there's so much change that if you're not tracking everything that you're doing. I'm never going to remember two years from now. Forget two years from now.

Two weeks from now what I did today. Right? And so if you go back and ask me what I did to process that data or collect that mobile phone, later, I'm not gonna remember it. So documentation becomes critical and translating into a legal context It's just reasonable.

Right? We we have to take reasonable steps to make sure that we're, doing the right things that we're tracking the right things that we're validating our results.

A lot of what we do, we don't, you know, we don't call it science. We don't maybe don't call it forensics, but It it does need to be scientific. It does need to be repeatable, measurable. If I do the same thing over and over again, I should get similar results.

And so we need to be looking at that from those ways. And if you're not measuring, you're not tracking, you know, how how many files and how what type of files that are getting errored out in processing.

If you're not tracking, you know, all the details of, you know, over time, these are the number of files from this particular custodian that are responsive or these are the ones that are privileged And in the next case, it's a different ratio. Why is that different? If you're not looking at those things, then you're missing opportunities to one ensure great service and the quality of service, but to also leverage that information for future success. And and if you don't, you know, a lot of what we do today now that we have ten or twelve years worth of information is we're learning.

We're constantly learning and our clients are benefiting from now us having, oh, you wanna know how many hours this hour's type of case and the granular detail that we can share and especially on clients repeat clients. Right? Clients that use have used us over a long period of time for their portfolio matters. I can tell you a lot about that client, and we can leverage that to reduce their costs, reduce the risk and the burdens, in going forward.

Well, I think it's, it's an exciting time. Right? I think, you know, we've lived Again, that's why I love this industry. It's like we just it's all these cycles we go through and it's always something new. And I love learning. I love problem solving.

That's what keeps me driving every day. So those are the things that I'm very excited about because here we are again at the next crossroads generative AI and how is it going to impact our industry? And there are so many ways and ways that we probably haven't even realized or thought of yet. I think it's gonna revolutionize our industry, and the entire legal industry, over the next few years.

I've never seen such momentum, excitement, and energy at our firm, let alone any firm, like we're seeing across the entire legal industry. But specifically for us, Again, I it's not so much about for me, and this is something I've shared. I know Daniel and I've talked a lot about, but in the past, and you know, for me, it's not so much about trying to reinvent the wheel or invent new innovative technologies or algorithms or I'm not an AI expert by any means. But for me, what I look for in what's happening now is how can I connect our attorneys, our clients to this awesome technology?

How can I build a bridge? How can I be a bridge? Between our legal needs, our challenges, our problems, and this awesome technology that's out there that everyone thinks about. You know, and because, you know, how do I get, you know, leverage, you know, some type of algorithm to extract information from a document?

Or summarize documents and all the, you know, large language models that are happening. So those are the things that I'm looking at is that I'm not necessarily so concerned. I would love to be a data scientist to be able to figure out the algorithms, but that's not me. What I am is I'm a problem solver.

So I'm a connector. Right? How how can I connect our clients, our needs, our processes, our problems to these new technologies and build those bridges, to make it easy to use, to remove the barriers to use, to remove the need from our attorneys to have to be experts in AI because we've simplified it and built in these processes into our systems? Yeah.

Absolutely. Which, you know, is something that we see people doing all the time you know, playing with the latest generative AI tools, not realizing that everything they're pasting out there, you know, is going right right into the cloud. Yeah.

And, the next searching algorithm is gonna put attorneys out of business. And now if people are saying, oh, my gosh. AI is gonna put us out of business. You had said something in a blog post, in January, Chris, that I love the analogy that she is, and I'd love for you to talk about it here as well. Where you're like, yeah, I look at it as, you know, I often use autopilot in a plane or nowadays in a car and the current use of an autopilot system. It's not a fly drive com completely.

Right? It's to help reduce fatigue. Right? I thought it was really interesting because it's a it's the same thing with the generative AI.

Yeah. Yeah. I and in fact, I One of the things I, I try to practice myself and that I encourage others to do too is that you got to constantly be learning. Like, if you're if you're not constantly moving forward, you're eventually the technology is gonna catch you. You know, if if all you're doing is importing data into a database, then eventually the technology is gonna catch up to you, and there'll be someone on a way to automate importing data into the database. And your job will be obsolete You got to always be learning. Always be pushing yourself.

I'm I'm always enjoying reading the latest article or following latest blog or podcasts.

So that that's something that I would encourage everyone to do.

And to your question, I think, you know, we're we're always got to be pushing kind of the on envelope of what we're doing. We've got to always be looking to how do we, leverage the latest technology, leverage the latest you know, generative AI in doing this.

And and trying to move that ball forward in a way that productive and that's useful.

You know, but at the same time that we still require a touch of, the training and of the human element to it that that's required. And frankly, and I don't wanna get too good in the weeds about cars. We're talking about eDiscovery, but in this analogy, the idea that humans are perfect drivers is just wrong. There are tens of thousands of traffic accidents.

Since every day and they're not using autopilot. Right? So I think in if there are ways for us to reduce the crashes in our industry of eDiscovery, by leveraging, you know, AI and automation to take repeatable past and make and make them less error prone, and allow humans to do the higher level thinking and training that's necessary. That I think that's, that's a good goal for us to look to.

Yeah. Absolutely do. I definitely think that for a lot of reasons, biases and ethics reasons in particular are are critical for for us and we think about AI.

But just even just practical, examples of we need to be able to validate results. I mean, we've been doing for a long time with predictive coding and tar. You know, we've been, you know, give me the f one score and, you know, and those types of things. We we We need those types of validations in what we do regardless of the technology regardless of where we're doing.

We need to be able to validate the results. We can't just trust. We have to trust but verify. And again, it's not eliminating the human.

It's just making better use only things the human can do and to verify the results that it was intended result for what the human had intended.

Yeah. I would say the probably the number one thing that has helped me be successful out my career is my, interest in learning, right, constantly wanting to learn, constantly reading, you know, as a non attorney, in particular, a lot of the reading that I did early on and, you know, reading articles, blog posts, things like that. Were were a lot of ways to educate me so that I could speak intelligently and interpret complex technical issues into something that an attorney could understand using language that they understand. Right?

We're just understanding myself how the law works. And so the lot of that foundational information that I was getting was critical. And now today, my readings not so much certainly about the legal and the law as it is about, you know, AI technology, generative AI, and large language models, and kinda to constantly teach myself these things, so that I can speak intelligently about it. And so that that pattern, that discipline, frankly, it's been easy for me because I love learning about this stuff.

It is something that has served me so well throughout it. And then when you combine that by other puzzles, other problem solving, I'm curious by nature. So those are those two things when you bring them together. An interest in learning and constant learning together with problem solving is a recipe, I think, for success.

In our industry, but frankly I think any industry in because it's innovative. It's I always have an idea thinking about new things and challenges that we can solve.

And I can't I don't always have the purview or the time or the support to solve everything.

But the ones that I can I can, then then that's great? And I'm well armed and prepared to make the argument of how the of the measurable value that it could bring in solving that problem. Chris, there's something to be said for curiosity.

And and constant learning. And for for those people that are listening to create a habit to create a routine, a ritual, to start off reading, just, you know, a couple chapters. Maybe even one chapter a day, in a book to your point and be a continuous learner, there is so much value to that. You could read about how to be a better reader. You could read about how to be a better problem solver, read about how to ask better questions.

I did. I read that religiously. Yes. Yeah. Yep. Jared is not surprised that I called my, eDiscovery newsletter to the gold standard.

No. No. Not quite. Not quite. It it was the virus though.