Navigating E-Discovery: Curiosity, Collaboration, and Proactive Data Management

Thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity.

Oh, what a loaded intro.

Leaving it up to me. I think if I were to classify my background first, you know, I've been in the eDiscovery industry for quite some time. I think what I love about my story is it's kind of a jack of all trades. You name it, I pretty much have done it. So how I got into the industry was on the vendor side of it, the legal vendor side. The paper and the scanning and the concordance and the summation.

And then we've always had our eye on the software part of it. So it was a natural transition to go to supporting the ESI piece of it. Trying to think of when that happened, like two thousand and three was the bridge between paper and ESI when you started getting the CDs and the hard drives, and then there was a shift to, you know, native ESI.

And so probably about fifteen or so years off and on, I was on the vendor side. But then I kind of got the feel for wanting to try different things. So went to defense firms, went to plaintiff's firms, did a little bit consulting. So a lot of law firms who needed help brought me in house as a consultant.

I've seen eDiscovery on all sides of the from all sides.

Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, I haven't been on the government side, but corporate has always been an area. It's just it's been really hard to come by because usually the corporate, they're either well established or they've got a set process in place. So the win for me was being able to come into the corporate and get that experience on top of all the other experiences as well, which I'm currently at now.

Yeah. It's funny. You're gonna start to get me into my personal, like, self awareness piece of it, but curiosity.

You know? I think one of the things that I was always told was don't job hop, don't do this, stay at jobs for two years.

And I don't wanna say I got bored, but I always needed to be challenged. And I found that with kind of learning the different softwares. But then you guys can speak to this too, like the different data sources, right? As as different data sources evolved, it was email, it was text, it was, you know, you have to kind of put the puzzle pieces together. And so as eDiscovery evolved, so did my curiosity.

And so I'm not gonna say I planned it because it was absolutely not planned.

But now in my current role, I'm so grateful for all those different experiences because at the time I just didn't realize how much they were gonna help me in my current role, which is the Global Assurance Services role.

Sure. You know, it's a unique opportunity. I think of, you know, audits and financial and all these other things. So we're kinda in a position where we get to kinda redefine it for our needs, which is around data. And it's basically a role that it's under a new structure of our group. So we work in a structure that's more of a global shared services.

So as a company, what we're doing is how can we work better together? How can we break down the silos? Because data is such a critical part to an organization like ours that truthfully, at least in my mind, so these views are completely my own.

If you're talking about data at the time that it's potentially litigation, in my mind, that's too late in the process. So what we're doing from insurance services perspective is we're trying to kinda move that conversation up. So if we're talking EDRMs, trying to get as close to the left side, even be you're right. The identification and the preservation and the collection, and those are really the only buckets that I'm thinking about right now.

But because of the data volumes and how fast they're growing and the parties that all share the datasets, privacy, compliance, and security are probably the core people where the conversation is evolving more towards those global areas.

Legal still has a seat at the table, but it's in a very different way, right? It's more corporate legal and how what risk does the data expose our organization to and how can we protect the organization?

So in a way, we're redefining it. So it's not your traditional what I call traditional assurance services.

We're redefining it to be kind of a hybrid approach of the traditional advisory services a little bit thrown in there. So using the skill sets that I've learned from eDiscovery, but bringing it to a new area, that's pretty much the privacy compliance and security focus.

Absolutely. I mean, our business systems, I mean, again, I'm not gonna do specific numbers, but, you know, corporations like ours, you've got a ton of internal business systems that, again, being in a heavily regulated industry, we have to ensure that we're compliant and that we can, you know, answer the things that we need to answer and have the information that we need. And, you know, the vision, or I shouldn't say our vision, but just the concept is that, you know, you have to be able to address risk at the pace of the business. And I think that's a game changing concept.

You know, I love this question. And the reason I love it so much is because I think it depends on the organization and leadership.

I think for what we're trying to do, it has to start from the top.

If I'm being completely transparent, I think the biggest challenges come from the traditional legal operations type thing because this is how we've always done it. And so they're used to being the drivers of a lot of the conversations. And what we're finding is that because the conversations have to happen earlier, it's changing the stakeholders who are at the table, who are having these conversations. Not to say that legal is not a part of it.

It's just it's a bigger conversation. There's more risk involved, and we have to kinda get involved in the process a lot earlier. And so how do you do that? And I think it's undefined.

Yeah. I think for my specific situation, I don't really have anything to do right now with legal eDiscovery. I call it the US legal process, right, because the eDiscovery process is pretty much driven by the US legal.

And because when you look at people in the UK, they don't necessarily understand our eDiscovery process in the US. So, I mean, that's just a thing. But because of the EDRM, which has been amazing, right, I don't necessarily know that e-Discovery and legal operations could be the way it is today without the EDRM.

However, I also know that I like to create maybe it's the graphic design part of me of, like, creating my own little model. And so I think what we're doing is legally discovery is a well oiled machine. You don't necessarily need to touch that because if you're gonna be involved in any litigation, you still have to follow that defensible process. So nothing changes there.

I think where I'm seeing the opportunity and I'm having a lot of success with it is because anybody outside of legal doesn't really understand the e-Discovery process. So when you say when you've got someone who's got a challenge, right? Everybody's got data. You've got a complex business system.

They don't know how to get the data out or it's very poor quality. What do you do? They don't wanna necessarily have to go through a legal process or eDiscovery process to figure that out. They're looking for a simplified process to say, how do I get to the critical information that I need as quickly as possible?

And so the opportunity where I see is two paths, like, are diverging.

My opportunity and the opportunities with Global Assurance Services is with the non legal, non litigation type of challenges.

And really, I'm charting my own path because nobody's ever really talked about it in this way before. So it's been really well received.

Again, love your question because the amazing part of it is eDiscovery has some pretty amazing technology. Right? But if you think about it, it's after the point of collection. Right? So you collect it up to a certain point, and then you kinda take it through this legally discovery process. And I'm not bashing legally discovery at all. It's just a very drawn out process.

What we're talking about is how can I use those same technologies because they are very good at certain things in different use cases? But there's this bubble around it, and I don't know where I'm getting this talent from, and I will pat myself on the bat for it, of being able to establish different types of connections, right, and get out of that legal bubble. But sometimes you're looking at everything through a legal lens that you can't simplify the process and it becomes complicated.

So I'm kind of looking at, okay, how can we use the same technology?

I'm not saying you don't have to worry about the same level of defensibility. You still need defensible processes, but I might be able to take a different path with the technology than you would in a formal legal eDiscovery that's adhered to by rules and things like that. So flexibility is key. And so it's getting creative with those technologies to kind of figure out how to adapt into the non legal situations.

Absolutely.

You've gotta learn how to build relationships. You have to be able to bring people together because it's not a one person show anymore. And so I have to work hard at actually building trust because without trust, no one's going to believe you. So you have to bring value, you have to demonstrate value, you have to earn their trust, and you really have to kind of make sure that you can show them how it's going to make their lives easier. And so for instance, you know, because we're focused on privacy, compliance, and security, you know, privacy and compliance hand in hand, regulatory reporting. Right? How can we get this information as quickly as possible while still respecting the privacy boundaries?

Everything we do used to be a one person job, but because of the evolution and the explosion of data, you have to have the skills to bring the parties together. But it also has to be decision makers, right? Because if you're talking at it from my level, I can't make decisions.

So it's been challenging, but I've had to actually develop personal skills as well, or my people skills.

You know, this might drive people crazy for anybody that knows me, but it's really all about questions, right? And it's not being afraid to speak up, and it's about making those connections to kind of see where there's a need. And I would say like one of the things that I see just across the industry and every job that I've had, really understanding the stakeholder needs. We used to say in the vendor days, like, you know, the order taker mentality, where where someone just asks for something, it's challenging and it's kinda scary, right? You're getting out of your comfort zone, but you're challenging kind of the norm.

But also you have to think about the risk of not doing it. And that's the kind of things that we're thinking about. It's like, what's the risk if we don't do this? Or if we don't talk to somebody about this? And the risk is far much greater than not being willing to speak up. And when I say challenge, I don't mean like challenge just because it's like my way or the highway.

It's if we're not getting something, we just really need to make sure that we're not taking no for an answer or we're not just kinda doing what somebody tells us to do. Because, again, there's too much at stake to not really think things through.

I think so. Because it's you know, I and I read a lot, and it's about asking the right questions. Right? Anybody can ask questions, but really being able to piece together what's missing and try to figure out. But, again, too, like, I wanna give credit where credit is due.

Collaboration, I think, is gonna be the most important thing because there's things that I don't have experience in that someone else on my team does. And I have to be willing to say that I don't know the answer to that. I'm going to get back to you. And then it becomes truly collaborative where you're bringing different resources together to solve it because it's, I don't think like one person can solve some of the stuff that we're dealing with.

One, I think gut instinct. Right? If I don't understand something, I tend to keep asking until I understand it because I think that was the rule that I learned when I was supporting the end users on software.

If I don't understand it, they're not gonna understand it. And it's probably why I give vendors and consultants a run for their money because if they're explaining something to me and I don't understand it, I'm going to keep asking questions until I understand it.

You know, like, really simple and keep it simple. And my brain goes into operational steps. And so anybody throws a wrench, and then I'm gonna keep asking questions. And so I'm like, what? What?

Yeah. And, you know, I think it's funny where if I look back on my career about all the things that I was willing to do, especially for a start up, a vendor start up, was operations. Like, I never wanted to go in operations. I never wanted to manage operations.

But those two years in operations for e-Discovery were probably the best thing that could have happened to me. Right? Because it goes back to documentation and things like that. And it's thinking about things in steps. Right? So a lot of times when I'm I'm in these conversations with stakeholders, they just jump into solving.

And it's a matter of saying, do you mind if we just take a step back? Like, how is something initiated? Could you walk me through the process of, you know, how something gets initiated? And then you start to see gradual steps. And and how that's carried over, and I hope I'm answering your question, is that it's led to a lot of what I call cheat sheets, right, where someone's like, well, what's his process? Like, how do you do e-Discovery processing?

And someone who's kinda taking you through this lengthy process of e-Discovery, and I think it's probably why I lose patients on webinar sometimes because it's really not that complicated. It's one, two, three, four, five. There's a lot of details in between, but I think that operational experience has allowed me to kinda say, what are the steps? And then you can kinda add those details to the steps.

And for us, as we're solving things with stakeholders, if any of those steps are missing or incomplete, then you know that's the area that you gotta focus on. And stakeholders are more than willing to kind of dive into it because again, if you're trying to solve for them and they see value in what you're doing, like, we just created a solution for a regulatory report that they couldn't get from anybody else because there was a disconnect with the user needs. But once you brought the right people together and you identified those gaps, people are like, oh, yeah. This is what we can do.

So we were kinda able to solve a regulatory reporting requirement for something that was just a little bit of a disconnect.

So so I wouldn't say others have failed, but it's bringing the right people together.

So there's the relationship building. I called in a lot of favors because I refused to take no for an answer. Yeah. I guess that's a good thing too.

Like, not taking no for an answer. I love that. But again, it's and that's where the collaboration, I think, if you talk about the future, corporate landscape is changing. And I think I'm really happy.

No. I know I'm really happy to be a part of a company and a structure with an organization that's saying, we have to see how we can help solve for multiple people and not just within silos.

And because of that, we're allowed to branch out into our lanes to say, okay, how can we bring people together? And I've never had that before.

So like, again, it starts from the top down.

They really wanna kind of figure out how to build shared services that's really gonna help many people.

We've got a lot of opportunities, I think, within our stakeholders. And I think success for me, it's always gonna be the end user and delivering for them. And so, you know, obviously, I can't get into execution or or details about projects, but we've got a list of a lot of opportunities where people want our help. And I, I think that's where reputation comes in, right?

Because in a corporate landscape, it's easy to get lost. So if you help somebody for one thing, they're going to come back to you for other things. And I think the thing that I love about our team is that we also know what our lanes are, but we're willing to bring opportunities that might not be something that we solve for, but I'm gonna find the right people in other towers to say, hey, we've got this opportunity. Can you help them?

And what we're finding is that we're able to bring people together across the organization. So to me, success would be continuing on that progress, and really kind of having an impact both like with influence and with like delivering things.

Saving money is a huge opportunity for us because truthfully, there's no incentive to, like, your data footprint. Right? So we're getting into data management, data disposition.

In legal eDiscovery, it's very hard to manage that footprint. And so like I said, if we look at it under a different lens, maybe we can come up with different approaches for things that don't necessarily have to go through litigation. So there's a huge cost savings opportunity there as well.

There's an over collection problem, right? And so what we've been trying to do is like, how can we get closer to the left side of the model from collection?

Now, in one of the vendors that I work for, we had an amazing forensics team. So we were always thinking outside the box about how can we call this data down using forensic tools prior to processing. Right? And through the evolution of the data and the technologies, we seem to have lost that. Where there's such to me in my mind, there's a disconnect between forensics and eDiscovery processing, where if you put those two together, you can do amazing things. And I think, like, your company has the resources to do that.

And I miss the days of creative thinking, instead of just pushing everything through processing for review. It's like, how can we take a step back and say, what can we do prior to processing? And reducing the data footprint is something critical that I know our organization is paying attention to.

Right?

Yep. Oh, absolutely. And like we haven't even talked on the data governance topic. Right? But if you think about it, in the million dollar question, there's actually a couple of them that I ask myself too, because it is worth millions.

Right? The data that's sitting there, I mean, in some situations you're talking terabytes, right? And now it's like petabytes.

The question for corporations, or at least in organizations like ours, and I don't mind the challenge, right? How do you do more with less?

And when you think about eDiscovery, you know, and I've been in there, you name it, I've done it, where you're so overwhelmed with the amount of data going through the process for like one matter and one litigation that you don't even have time to breathe. Right? You're kind of focused on what you're doing to try to get the relevant data reviewed and produced.

So I hate to say it, but data disposition and data management and data governance kind of becomes like second thought where you constantly have to be going back and saying, what do we do with the data that we're not using? You know, and some of it could be legal hold, some of it could be other things, but it's, I feel like that part of the process is overlooked and we need to be getting rid of more data.

Being proactive as opposed to reactive with respect to the data is almost it has to be a necessity when you're talking about, you know, data disposition, right, and you're talking about data governance. It's funny as you're talking, it makes me wonder why I even call my practice e-Discovery managed services as opposed to just legal managed services because we often so often talk about the concept of being proactive about how we're handling data. You know, it's about reduction of cost. It's about reduction of risk.

Yeah. And, you know, it's asking who else. Right? Like, who else is using this data? Now, again, too. Right? Like, I'm not trying to solve for legal, right, because there's some specific uses for legal and data as it goes to that process.

But, again, it's asking questions earlier in the process to say, is there a way to reduce this data so that it's not, you know, just that I'm gonna go collect this guy's inbox and just get whatever I can get and then push it through the process and then reduce it afterwards. Right? Because, again, I think if we were talking about the hard drives coming in, okay, great. We can deal with a couple hard drives and we can do all that.

But we're not talking about hard drives anymore. We're talking about what on average, thirty gigs per person, and you could have hundreds of custodians on one single matter. Like, that's the stuff that you have to kinda change your perspective to. So maybe maybe some of the stuff that I'm doing now might not directly impact the legally discovery, but I can tell you organizations are having conversations around how do we unify the access to share data across the org.

Well, I really wanna love my manager into on this conversation too because he and I talk about this all the time. I mean, a lot of times people ask me, like, how did you get, you know, the opportunity to get a role like this? And it's and that it might sound cheesy, but it's true. It's it's people having people believe in you.

I don't know that it'll be called Assurant Services, but I do think, and I've talked about a good friend of mine who's in the industry as well, about my vision. And I do wanna start writing about it because I do think there's an opportunity for what we're talking about today, whatever it's called. I think it's gonna be a requirement for global organizations. And, you know, people will say, well, is this a corporate thing?

And it's like, well, you could even look at law firms, right? Because a lot of times it's that eDiscovery mindset. And I think what I'm here to say is think beyond eDiscovery, right? You're still a business.

A law firm is still a business. Your behaviors of your employees is still gonna impact data breaches, things like that, bad behavior, things like that. There's a lot of risk regardless of what your organization, structure is or whatever type of organization. But from a corporate perspective, there's just too much at stake with the amount of data.

So I think it's going to become something that you'll see more often in corporations.

Thank you for having me. This has been fantastic.