LegalWeek Interview: David Cohen of Reed Smith

Yes. So I am a partner at the global law firm of Reed Smith, and I head up Reed Smith's records in eDiscovery practice group. So we have about eighty lawyers in the group, and we focus as the title says on eDiscovery, and records, which would be the broader field of information governance, and so my jobs include supervising that team of lawyers doing client work, and also staying up to speed on what's going on in the eDiscovery and legal technology environment. And I have known you for years and you're being a little bit modest as well.

Yes. And I've also been involved with Sedona on the advisory board of Georgetown Advanced Discovery Institute, I help advise master's conference involved with solid. So try try try to keep a hand in a lot of the different One wonders how you have time for the day job, actually. They've No.

Probably more than twenty because it used to be called legal tech. I like that name, Moe. Better, but go ahead. Yeah.

You know, they did the virtual one that I may have missed. Yeah. I used to go back when we used to call it automated litigation support and we were dealing with paper documents and, you know, microfilming and imaging and computerizing things that the new litigators of today and even not so new litigators at times they don't even remember probably.

I do agree. And your comment is interesting to me because I was trying to figure out for something I was doing when the term eDiscovery was first coined. I did go back and I spoke at a conference in New York in two thousand. I still had flyer for it where I spoke on electronic discovery.

And back then it wasn't even abbreviated to eDiscovery yet. So That's the first reference I can find to electronic discovery. And somebody asked me to come speak on that and I thought, what's electronic So, yeah, that was the start of it. But you're right.

There's no such thing. There's almost no such thing as discovery that's not eDiscovery. Although, I guess you could say, well, the deposition piece of it, you know, is different than the document piece. But the document piece ninety five percent of the documents now in our cases or in electronic form.

Well, paper discovery, paper discovery. I don't know if it'll trend. But having come back so this year last year, Do you notice anything different about this legal week over some other previous years? Yeah.

It's well, certainly, it's a lot bigger this year than it was. Before. There have been ups and downs. I mean, there were times when I think there were more booths in there or this year when we go back, like, five or ten years.

Yeah. Yeah. But you know what I would say that has just been a constant trend in the industry is just the growth. I mean there's so many more people now you know, when you came to Legal Tech, fifteen years ago it was old home week and you'd be running into the same, you know, it was few hundred people, not thousands of people like we have now.

And so it's nice to see those all familiar faces. We've been doing this a long time, but we're outnumbered by the people that have just started doing eDiscovery or discovery, I'll say, in the last five years. It's exciting to see a new generation and it's exciting to see new technologies. Again, five years ago I would say, E-discovery dominated legal week.

And now I see almost as many, like, contract AI exhibitors in the booth area. And all kinds of other use of technology. And they they always did have a variety of technologies exhibited at this particular conference. But I think there's been consolidation among the company, so there may be actually fewer companies today than there were five years ago in eDiscovery, but more companies are branching out and using tech technology for other fields of law well beyond eDiscovery.

Yeah, so part of it is just networking with people that and that's been great because there are people that I hadn't seen in three you know, since pre pandemic, and so it's just get great to get back together with folks. But we had a couple specific objectives. We're looking at a couple of software pieces and we set up demos and discussions, and it's an opportunity not only for us to network with them, but my colleagues in different offices don't always get together either. And we have a technology subsidiary Gravity Stack.

In giving that gift of knowledge to other people. Well, certainly it you know, I do try to write. I have a blog, a viewpoints blog, any discovery, and I write periodically write articles. And this gives me fodder for that.

Sharing some of the knowledge that we pick up here at legal week with others through writing and through presentations, etcetera, what you're doing right now. You're you're sharing knowledge. And so, definitely, I have my to do list of probably ten things I should do coming out of legal weekend if I get four of them, that would be probably better than average. Right.

Because as you say, you return to your day job and you're overwhelmed. But, yeah, I do have a lot of follow-up goals coming out of legally. That's great. Well, you can count on me for reading them when it comes out with it.