LegalWeek Interview: Phil Weldon of Kaplan Hecker & Fink

I'm Phil Weldon. I'm the director of eDiscovery and litigation support technology at Kaplan Hecker & Fink, which is a boutique litigation powerhouse here in New York City. I like how you describe that a litigation boutique powerhouse. I like that.

Maybe as many as fifteen. So you just told me without telling me how many years you've been in this business. Have you been in this business more than fifteen? Yeah. Been in this business about twenty years, twenty one years.

It was just discovery. It was just discovery. Yeah. Interesting conversations that we've been having throughout legal week is that People are saying, we just need to actually just call Discover again.

Everything is electronic papers going away.

Yeah. I actually I'm probably one of the few that doesn't have a real strong preference. On what they call it because I feel like doing this technology work, I'm constantly learning new acronyms, new names for things.

And everyone calls something slightly different. So it wouldn't really faze me if we just started calling it discovery again.

Which would be fine. I don't really have a strong strong stance on that one. Or what we can do is since everything is electronic, if we're gonna use paper, we should just start calling it e-discovery. There we go.

Yes. I actually spoke at legal week during the pandemic.

On a panel.

Because you've been to almost as many as I've been to over the years. What is it like for you? It feels very similar to how it was in the past. It seems like this time there's more excitement.

Mhmm. You know, usually people are kind of like dreading it. Right. I've always been excited about in general because I enjoy meeting people and learning new things.

And people have actually told me that I have like a fairly intense schedule when I've dragged them along to like of the meetings that I go to and they're like, you're not stopping for lunch and I'm like, well, don't have time. Yeah. I mean, I enjoy it. It seems like there's more general further and enthusiasm for it this year.

I think Yeah.

And I've personally had a lot of fun playing with it. But there's interesting challenges and issues with it. A colleague of mine was mentioning that it makes up stuff.

Mhmm. So if you're asking it for like quotes and stuff, it will just generate them. And then when you try to go and find where those quotes came from, you can't. And then also when you tell it not to make up fake quotes, it still makes up fake quotes.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where it's like that's totally accurate. It's really interesting. It's a it's a super cool starting point.

I can see the use of it on a ton of different things like I would love my own personal g p t bot that I could just point at a data set and then use it to query the dataset, I think that would be really cool.

My concern is that there's just gonna be a lot of fake bad content, and you're not gonna be able to tell the difference with what's real and what's not. It's a whole new world. They they said within five days, there's over millions of users that quickest adoption over any other -- Yeah. -- platform technologies out there.

That's a that's a good question. I don't think I had one thing that I was most excited about learning. I wanna meet a lot of faces behind the apps that we're using. I wanted to get a lot of demos from specific companies that I was interested in.

Generally, the meetings that I take are really helpful because you meet the people behind the tools. Right. And you get to know more about the company and you learn about features that they may not often advertise and so like you get this like insider knowledge about the application and then the other thing that's super fun and what I love about going to legal technology conferences is the panel discussions.

So you will often hear and you can read between the lines how they are doing stuff in their own practices.

And so like There's a lot of talk about people using active learning for privilege reviews -- Yep. -- which seems very risky to me. But the amount of people that are talking about they just like, it is their standard course.

It's really fascinating. One of the panels that I sat in on yesterday, was hilarious because one of the speakers was mentioning that ephemeral apps are actually perfect for compliance in his corporation and he was saying because there's no retention. Everything disappears. It's all gone.

But like the fact that somebody's just out there saying, oh, it's perfect for compliance. You're like scared because you're like, we need the data. You know what I mean? It's relevant and it can it can help you.

What was interesting is that there's still a natural presumption there is some sort of nefarious purpose. Right. And what you're talking about with that panel, what's interesting is that it is rebutting this presumption that if you can prove as of a compliance program that there is a legitimate business purpose and in the normal course of business -- Mhmm. -- we are doing this and it's to save let's say, data storage costs.

Yeah. So that argument is coming up more and more. So it's interesting if that is gonna be more of a de facto argument amongst security compliance professionals to say, hey, wait a second. I'd much prefer all these conversations on signal and etcetera.

Not that specific one, I don't think. But yeah, that's really interesting. And and totally agree with you that a lot of people, the default is like it seems like sketchy app if it's not saving it, but then there is a lot of people that are like, oh, I'm one hundred percent privacy focused. You know, I don't want other people to have my data and like signal specifically and WhatsApp and Telegram are super easy to install and turn on.

So it's not like twenty years ago when you had to set up like PGP and it was like super complicated to do your email and make it be like secret message. Now it's just like go to the app store, download it, install it. And you're done. And you're and you're in the secret world.

And this is like not firm specific. So it's not even like just my company. It's not like specific category of clients like finance or something like that, it's like across the board, people that are privacy focused are interested in this. They read about it in the newspaper.

Correct. It's easy to use. And I think for eDiscovery professionals, it is going to be a challenge I mean, signal specifically is such a challenge because there's only a couple of ways to collect it when it is there and both of those are problematic.

The gift or knowledge that I would share mostly is something that has been more eloquently iterated on by others and I'll tell specifically, but just this the general be kind, you know. That's something that I've recently been strongly advocating for. And I've just seen my career take off the connections that I've made everything becomes easier when you're friendly with people. And I think the challenge in eDiscovery and litigation is everyone is so stressed out.

You know, there's incredible deadlines and it's very easy to slip into like a negative mindset. And so I've just found, you know, being kind, trying to have an attitude of gratitude as it were, has really been an incredible game changer for me. And so like that's like the takeaway that I would have for people is just, you know, be kind and you'll be surprised at how how many doors open for you and what you're able to achieve with that mindset.

Yeah. Thanks for having me. This is really cool.