Name: Litigation Ready: From Fighting Fires to Building Firebreaks
Uploaded: 2025-02-26T19:16:09.469Z
Duration: 1 h 8 s
Description: Litigation Ready: From Fighting Fires to Building Firebreaks

Transcript for "Litigation Ready: From Fighting Fires to Building Firebreaks": Welcome everybody, and thank you for joining us for this webinar, Litigation Ready from Fighting Fires to Building Firebreaks. The theme of today's conversation is the do more with less dynamic for in house legal departments and and ways to centralize and streamline any discovery program to be successful in the modern era. I'm I'm a strategic account executive with Everlaw, and more importantly for today, your moderator. I'm joined by three phenomenal panelists who I'll let briefly introduce themselves, in turn. Joe Henry, I'll I'll start with you. Thanks, Chad. It's a pleasure to be here today. Pleasure to be speaking to everyone. My name is Joe Henry Mansfield. I serve as managing counsel overseeing the Discovery Management Unit within Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company. We sit within our corporate litigation department, and we provide litigation support and ediscovery services on behalf of our corporate litigation portfolio. We handle all workflows across the entire electronic discovery reference model, and we work with any matter in which Nationwide is a corporate entity would be an interested party. Everything from contractual disputes to class actions to contingent extra contractual liability issues to employment cases. We work, pretty extensively with our internal and external partners as well and and are very pleased to be recognized as, people at the the forefront of, ediscovery practice. So, again, it's a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me to speak today. Yeah. Thank you, Joe Henry. Jeff, if you would like to give a brief introduction for yourself as well. Sure. Thanks, Chad. My name is Jeff Roche. I am also with Nationwide within the DMU. Specifically, I serve as managing counsel over the litigation technology center of excellence within the DMU. And, our focus is primarily on managing the data within the organization, legal holds, remediation, also managing document review projects, when litigation does for your rights head. Great. Thank you. And, Michelle, last but certainly not least, if you could give a brief introduction. Sure. I am Michelle Six. I am, of counsel at or where I co lead the ediscovery practice group with my partner, Christine Payne. I am super happy to be joining you today. And, my advice generally pertains to sort of vet the company litigation. I always joke that if I've been brought on, probably something has gone wrong, but the scope of our practice generally is across the EDRM from information governance to helping folks with preservation, thoughtful document collection, review production, and and beyond. Great. Thank you so much. Before we jump into the the meat of the conversation, just a quick housekeeping matter for all those watching. Although we won't be handling questions live, if you do have questions throughout the webinar, please submit them at the chat, and we will be sure to to follow-up after the webinar to answer them. Alrighty. Well, diving in, just to set some context, I I want everyone to understand just a bit more about what each of you do in terms of, your work, in house eDiscovery. So, Joe Henry, starting with you, if you could tell us in broad terms about your in house legal and eDiscovery teams in Nationwide, what your remit is, and how you collaborate with internal and external partners? Yeah. Absolutely. Nationwide has been very forward thinking when it comes to eDiscovery. In fact, we've had an internal eDiscovery group for over twenty years, and I've I've been privileged to be with them for about six years. So I'm kind of standing on the shoulders of giants here in terms of my predecessors, but, it's an internal, team that sits within corporate litigation. And as I mentioned earlier, we provide support across the entire portfolio of corporate matters. We also serve as, counsel to our records management team and have a number of internal and external partners that we work with. In addition to ediscovery and litigation support services, we also provide privacy and compliance, advice. We assist with privacy events or incident response, cybersecurity inquiries, and we also are brought in to consult on data remediation requests, state privacy requests, as well as technological assessments for new enterprise technologies. So we really have a role to play, and this is, I think, something we'll talk about later on in the webinar. But, ediscovery is not an ediscovery professional wears many hats. Right? And so we end up interfacing with many different business units across the enterprise. And so we provide risk assessments, legal hold analytics, data remediation or migration, consultative services, and we partner with our digital forensics team as well. Very pleased to note that our discovery management unit comprises multiple centers of excellence as Jeff testified to earlier, and, we are seen as a trusted partner with pretty much every business unit throughout the enterprise. Yeah. Thanks, Joe Henry. I I I really like when you talk there. It fits into the theme nicely about your group helping tons of different groups that touch eDiscovery, not necessarily just litigation. What fits into the theme nicely? Jeff, you joined Nationwide in the last year, I believe. Can you talk about your role and how it is different, from your prior experiences? Sure. So I've been with Nationwide for about eight months. Prior to that, most of my career was spent on the vendor side, specifically in the managed document review space. So I was in charge of the teams of contractors brought in kind of at the end of the process. So we had that one piece of one slice of the EDRM and did our best with it. The beauty of the role that I'm in now is that we have control over much more of the model, much more of the process, and it's both exciting and daunting at times, that we have a fantastic group, of folks with whom I work. Eight months in, I am the new kid, and my understanding is I'll be the new kid for quite some time. And that's okay, because it's an opportunity to learn a lot more about the way the organization works, how those pieces come together, and kind of to echo Joe Henry's comment about standing on the shoulders of giants. There's some great giants, and it gives a good perspective from the shoulders to kind of look forward and see ways to continue to grow and advance the group. Yeah. It's great. Thank you. I I I smiled a bit when you said I I'm the new kid and will be the new kid for a while. It reminded me of George Harrison in The Beatles, always feeling like Paul Paul's younger brother. But, Michelle, so you're typically retained by organizations that that don't have a robust ediscovery program. And your your view as outside counsel is really important. Can can you tell us about your work with clients in the range of ediscovery approaches that you're seeing? Yeah. I would actually say it it really depends and that our clients are are widely situated in this regard. Sometimes we're actually retained by folks who do have a super robust, thoughtful department, you know, folks like Joel Henry, like Jeffrey, and they're doing all the good work, trying to manage and navigate just really, really tricky discovery obligations, with grace and and diplomacy. And sometimes we'll find, our clients with with sort of no internal support structures in this regard. So we have to be a little bit nimble, a little bit flexible when we come in because we don't know if we're coming into something where there is a sophisticated structure, where we need to figure out how we can mesh with the the good institutional knowledge that the client has and the processes they have in place, or if we're coming in where there is sort of no path, there's no road map, it's wide open, and we have to come in and help guide them, strategically into finding ways to to to set up their processes in repeatable, thoughtful protocols. And and what can be really hard sometimes is when you you find a client who has a really strong structure in place, but maybe there's one thing that's not there. Right? Like, historically, they haven't had to deal with a certain type of discovery or historically, they've been successful doing things one way, and they don't maybe wanna change that that process. So trying to navigate, talk to the clients in the in the place that they are when you find them, come in and be helpful. But also, I think as outside counsel, it's really, really mission critical that we come in and listen as well. If you kinda come in like a bowl in a China shop and like, do it this way. Everything you're doing is wrong. That tends to be, super, uncomfortable, and maybe you don't, you're not the most likable outside counsel in the room. So we try to come in, play really, really nicely with Merit's counsel, and explain to clients that good discovery strategy goes hand in hand with trial strategy right from the beginning. And we are there to help everybody look good and to do things in a defensible, thoughtful, strategic way. That's great. Thank you. Turning to some of the the pressures that in house teams, are facing. So we have the context, of your roles that each of you play in in making an in house legal department successful. But turning to the pressures and why you're doing that and why you're moving to certain certain approaches, I wanna cover next. Joe Mansfield, going back to you, you know, a recent industry report showed that over 40% of chief legal officers globally received a cost cutting mandate from their company in the past year. So it's it's not surprising their top strategic initiative for the year is to operate more efficiently. What are some of the pressures your team is under to do more with less, to be proactive and and efficient in handling the disputes that come across your desk? You know, I think everyone is being more cost conscious these days, and it's it's the result of the explosion of data that's just processable, collectible, identifiable, right, producible in terms of, litigation, data universes. And then, of course, the the varying types of data and the the increase in overall litigation across the board. You know, nationwide is no acceptable. We're susceptible to the same, market forces that anyone else is. Right? And so doing more with less becomes the the watchword. And I think this in part explains the explosion of interest in, AI, generative AI. Right? New forms of technology that can help to to find ways to increase return on investment, and and efficiency within your in house litigation practice. So in terms of of pressures that we face, obviously, cost is going to be one, making sure that we are showing that return on investment that we are justifying our own positions and, of course, the continued existence of this group with cost savings, data savings, debt remediation. In in addition to that, demonstrating the value that we provide in terms of hours saved, FTE saved. Right? It's not just about the dollars spent, but it's also about the efficiency of the process, the expediency of the process. And then speaking to risk, in a you know, we have, of course, there's the exposure risk that comes with litigation. There's the data risk that comes with managing large sets of information, but there's also a data governance piece. There's a preservation, a spoliation risk. We provide, advice and and consultation on those those pieces. There's data loss prevention, sensitivity, data sensitivity. Right? State privacy requests. I spoke to that earlier. And techno technological assessments. So when new technology is brought in, is it going to fit within our ediscovery workflows, or is it something that's gonna need modification? All of this speaks to the question of managing risk, whether it's current or future state risk. And there the the pressure comes in an indirect sense because not every other part of the business may necessarily understand those risks, but, ultimately, everything trickles down to litigation at some point. If the risk gets high enough, then suddenly it manifests in litigation and all of a sudden, your litigation group, your litigation support group, right, the discovery management unit, someone like us in house is now obligated to deal with it. Oh, again, not the theme you'll hear. I think a lot is announcer prevention is worth a pound of cure. A lot of what we do is is, try to meet those pressures by addressing them proactively and avoiding those risks, avoiding those problems before they become much bigger issues. Returning to the question of cost, you know, I think a stat that I've seen, and the Rand Institute had a study a little while back that said that everyone knows discovery is by far the the most time consuming and most expensive component of litigation. The cost cost per gigabyte, I think, is about 12 to $18,000 per gigabyte to go through the EDRM, right, for processing processing to production, which which narrows down to about 3 to $8 a document. When you have that much information and data continuing to grow at an exponential rate, right, we're measuring data in petabytes, exabytes, just for one company, then obviously there's a lot of pressure internally to keep costs low, to find ways to increase efficiency, consistency, and ultimately protect the interests of, of our enterprise. Yeah. You mentioned, I think in preparation for this, you may you mentioned the shift from being a cost center to cost savings, and then if you can show that ROI and justification, you can get the tools that you need, the things that you need to be able to drive even more cost savings, which I think is a phenomenal way to look at it. Michelle, you know, among companies you work with that don't have ediscovery tools or processes in house, you know, who may be outsourcing the majority of their work. What are some of the most common pain points that you see? And I I think you alluded to to some of them in the beginning. Yeah. So nothing makes you more popular with a c suite than when you remind them that ediscovery is the area of litigation that comes with the most risk and potentially the highest costs. They get very unexcited about, talking to you about about what you do. And one of the ways that that the pain points are compounded is that oftentimes, how we measure success in ediscovery, right, how we measure that ROI that Joel Henry was talking about, is nothing. It is the absence of anything. Right? Nothing bad happened today. We didn't get sanctioned today. We didn't have expensive motion practice. We didn't have a bunch of our privileged documents ordered to get produced or downgraded from a privilege log. We didn't lose on a motion to compel. Right? So when things go really, really well, there's not a lot to point to other than, like, nothing bad happened, which which is a challenging thing to sort of put down on paper and and gloat about too much. But that is oftentimes how we measure our success. Right? Because the the the pinpoints that that that I think all companies are experiencing right now are related to that risk and to the cost just as Joel Henry said. So we have the cost of overpreservation. Right? We have the challenge of, okay, we need defensible, reasonable preservation. But if we have overpreservation, we have crazy costs associated with that, and we have data privacy, data security risks. Right? Nobody wants to be saving or holding on to data any longer than they absolutely need to pursue into their reference policy, regulatory obligations, and legal hold obligations. So that's a big pinpoint. Another big pinpoint is, you know, when you have a big giant, series of sort of overlapping cases and different outside counsel may be helping you, trying to streamline discovery. So they actually had different vendors and and and different firms advising on the same discovery challenges, but actually streamlining and sort of centralizing processes in a way that helps maintain efficiencies and consistency with respect to to relevance and privilege calls, those are big challenges too. So I think for companies trying to figure out how to how to mitigate their risk, but also mitigate their costs while trying to also celebrate, nothing bad going on. Those are those are some of the big challenges we see. So it sounds like and and correct me if I'm reading reading wrong here, but it sounds like one of the big challenges and pain points is just fragmentation of processes, of decision making, of technology, right, and not having things consolidated. Well, Michelle, staying with you, you're you're typically retained because the company may not have robust playbooks or or templates, strong data governance, things you've talked about. What types of risks do you see here, and how do you advise these folks? So I think one of the one of the big challenges is is coming in to a case that maybe has been going on for a long time. Right? Because one of the things about ediscovery case law that is so unique as opposed to maybe other areas of the law is that it's changing every second. So if I have an issue that, you know, is has come up, about an emerging technology or about mobile devices or something, you know, a client has said, hey. What is the sort of state of the art on this? And I ask an associate to go off and and scurry off and do some research and come back to me, and they come back to me with a case that's from 2014. I I can, with a fair amount of confidence, say, I bet that there might be something more recent. And by more recent, I mean, like, yesterday. Right? Because we are just in this sort of constant state of flux with technology. And because of that constant state of flux and in in innovation with technology, the case law for ediscovery is constantly constantly evolving. And so that is one of the places where I think we sometimes have challenges, where we've got a case that's been going on for a good amount of time, But what was defensible and reasonable sort of when the case started may look really different now just because of all the different types of technologies, either either Teams chats or, you know, Zoom recordings or WhatsApp messages or all sorts of hyperlinked hyperlinked documents. Things that, you know, maybe didn't exist when the case began at the inception of the case, but now are real. And so are there ongoing discovery obligation we need to be thinking those through. That's that is one big area where I think we are constantly sort of, again, having to be nimble, having to be on our toes a little bit. But, again, it's another great opportunity to really partner with your in house ediscovery group, ediscovery team because nobody's gonna know the data as well as they do. Nobody. And so to make sure that you are talking to them, understanding what's there, understanding what data systems may be in use and who is using them and what sort of reasonable preservation, reasonable collection opportunities exist is super important. Yeah. And, you know, one thing that you you've talked about and heard you mention this in the past is managing a lot of these privilege considerations across a big portfolio. Right? Can you talk a little bit about that as a risk? Sure. So privilege is, horribly hard in that if you got 10 attorneys in a room and handed them the exact same document and said, what is privileged about this document? You could get 10 different responses. You might get somebody who says it's not privileged at all. You may get five people who say it's all privileged. All of it, totally privileged. You might see other people who say, well, hold on a second. Like, this part should be redacted. This part can be produced in discovery. And none of those opinions are necessarily wrong and none of them are necessarily right. It would be great if there was this sort of super bright line rule. And and on paper, there is a bright line rule. Right? You say, well, it's you know, if something's attorney client privileged, it is, communication containing or requesting or reflecting legal advice about something. That is very, very challenging, when you are outside counsel looking at documents, trying to figure out how that legal advice, you know, relates to a pending legal matter, whether it might be more like business advice than legal advice, it becomes hard. And it becomes a lot harder when there are millions and millions of documents to look at. And so either you've enlisted contract attorneys to potentially help you make some of those initial determinations, whether you're using technologies to help you make those determinations. And when you get to harder, more challenging privilege calls and you've got a case where, you know, and Joe, Henry, and Jeff can speak to this. I'm sure there might be cases where they've got five or six different outside counsel teams working on some aspect of the matter. Right? And so if you've got the same documents hosted on different platforms, where different privilege calls are being made, that is that is that is scary. Right? Because then you could have potentially situations where the same document is treated differently, not out of any ill intent or or and again, not out of any incorrect assumption or or determination, but just a different determination, a different analysis. But that is where I have seen clients face real challenges where, you know, one set of plaintiffs is maybe the same plaintiff's counsel for multiple cases and they'll say, well, hey. Hold on. This document on your privilege log here, we got produced three years ago and then I have it right here. Here's what it says. And and so when you when you start dealing with those really challenging privilege inconsistent calls is when you can see, again, that huge uptick in cost, that huge uptick in risk because you're fighting. Right? You wind up fighting over documents where if there potentially had been a more centralized, a more consistent way to sort of see other people's treatment, look look up prior characterizations of the document, see if maybe something had been subject to a challenge, a downgrade in the past. Right? Yep. Those types of things will help really, streamline and and and and mitigate cost and and promote efficiencies in those types of particularly challenging instances. Yeah. So in in turning back to the nationwide team, I'd like to ask you all all a very similar question. Joel Henry, we can start with you. What do you view as is the biggest risk to a company when teams are using a lot of manual approaches and just outsourcing majority of their hosting and eDiscovery work and lack a little bit of that centralization? Well, I have to agree with Michelle. You know, consistency or, I guess, inconsistency is is one of the biggest risks, and there are a lot of other risks that flow from, inconsistency in practice. Right? But you wanna have well established best practices, playbooks, templates. Right? Existing relationships with certain vendors. Michelle spoke to this. Sometimes you may have multiple different counsel, different vendors, and it's not your your internal team, they're subject matter experts about your data, and that's another risk, in terms of not having someone. Someone has to come in and has to reinvent the wheel. They have to learn every single time. Right? But they also understand and might manage the relationships with their outside consultants, outside outside counsel, outside vendors. Right? And so they know exactly where each piece can be best slotted into the puzzle of the EDRM to get the best results, the most cost efficient, the most time efficient. Right? And so that's you know, when you talk about risk in terms of using a manual approach or ad hoc approach, you're talking about slowing things down, costing more money, reinventing the wheel. When it comes to your internal work, you may be thinking about things like storage costs, over retention. Michelle spoke to this. Over preservation or potentially under retention, spoliation of of critical litigation related information. Right? Your internal teams know the data map of your company. They're the best situated to understand it. And outside counsel, with all due respect, right, they have to learn it when they come in. If you have a working relationship with them, they're gonna start to learn little wedges, pieces of that pie. Right? But no one's gonna understand it as well as you do, your internal resources. And one of the great advantages of having an in house legal team, an in house e discovery team, is that you sit on that bridge between IT and legal, and you're speaking both languages. Right? So you're the Rosetta Stone that's translating between the two, but you also understand the needs and the interests of both in a way that, you know, IT doesn't want to deal with the legal side, and legal doesn't always want to deal with the tech side. And so if you have a team that can kind of speak to both, you are reducing those inefficiencies, potentially finding information that you wouldn't find before, preserving data that you need to preserve because, again, your IT team, as expert as they may be, they just don't think in terms of litigation. Some of the other risks that you might have comes in the terms of data sprawl. Right? So when you are engaging external resources to come in and start looking at either you can pay for them to map your entire company's data and start sifting through and looking for information. But, again, they're informed by litigation. They're looking for keywords. They're looking for certain semantic content. They don't know what they don't know. They don't know the terms of art. They don't know the the kind of skeletons in the closet, so to speak. They don't know where the information is hidden, and it can be hidden in many different places, but your internal teams do. They know the right people. They know the right custodians. They have that insight to go and find the needles in the haystack and reduce your hosting costs if you're gonna be putting something in an external database, reduce your review time if you're using external contractors for review or if you're using outside counsel. Right? You why pay for a hundred hours of review when you maybe only really need ten with the right search terms or with the right targeted collections? I wanna give Jeff a a chance to speak. So I'll I'll I'll just kind of Pass the finish. By saying, you know, one other thing that is a is a hidden cost, a hidden risk, is that if you are using exclusively outside resources, right, you'd never have you never know what you're missing. You never have the opportunity to understand what an in house team can do for you, what kind of ROI they can offer. Right? Again, outside outside sources or resources, they had to start from scratch. They you can't replicate that understanding of data, that that internal knowledge, and it takes time to bring in an outside resource. You know, if it's someone who's starting from from the very bare bones beginning, right, and they're going through the procurement process and they're signing SOWs, it could be a year or more before they actually are ready and onboarded and have all the connections and the APIs that they need to access the information. Right? Or you could have a team that's already proven themselves as experts in managing your litigation workflows, jump right on it, and and handle it from the very beginning. And so I think that's that's one of those hidden costs that doesn't always get considered when people think about that inside versus outside dynamic. Yeah. That's great. Jeff, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this too, about the risks in house teams face. And and maybe focusing on that, the the thing that Joel Henry just talked about, these hidden cost overruns. Can you talk from from your point of view, what are the common sources of of hidden cost overruns and litigation that that in house teams and our listeners should be aware of? Sure. So, I think with the in house team, what you are doing is you're starting with a steady foundation, and you're constantly working on repairing that foundation, shoring up, expanding that foundation. One of the issues with the more that you turn over to an outside team, the more work that they have to do plug in holes, or it's almost like a game of whack a mole at times. We are hiring experts, from the outside to do the kinds of things that you can handle better, more efficiently inside. So I think of efficiency in terms of time and cost and accuracy. You save time by having those subject matter experts internally, take care of those foundational items, build that consistent process, from which you're working. You increase accuracy because every time somebody has that opportunity to make a manual decision, that is some of their attention that's being taken away. And so if we're hiring outside counsel as experts in that litigation space, experts on the kind of legal matter that you're dealing with, the less time they have to focus on where do I find this data, what data might be missing, who the heck are the custodians we need, the more time, the more focus they have to put on the reasons that you hired them. And so from my perspective, the more that you can kind of shore up and then hand off to the people you need at the place you need them, the better their focus is going to be, the more efficient your operation is going to be in terms of both time savings, cost savings, and accuracy. I just said both, but I meant throat. Fair enough. Thank you very much. So this is a good segue in talking about how do we action some of these improvements and what does an action plan look like. So for teams, instead of putting their heads down and just powering through the chaos, how do they take a step back, be more strategic with the design just to gain some of that greater control over cost, risk, some of those things. Michelle, coming back to you, we know that discovery is the area of litigation where folks are spending the most money. They see the highest risks. How do you explain to clients that a modest amount of investment internally could turn into substantial financial savings or risk reduction down the road? Yeah. It's a great question. And it's a challenge. Right? It's a challenge when when we are being engaged for the first time. It's a challenge when we have long term clients to continue to sort of explain, why, you know, the good advice we gave two years ago isn't quite enough. They they might need some more advice for the next two years as well. I I think one of the ways that you discover is so unique as a practice area is that we aren't to to have a successful practice as outside counsel to have a successful in house group, it's not just a bunch of lawyers. And I say that as a lawyer. I I do think I add some I'd like to think I add some value, but I would not be able to be giving the sound good comprehensive advice that I that I that I like to give and that I think I can give without my team. And my team is not all lawyers. Right? For ediscovery, it's so important to have good project managers, solid paralegals, project analysts, technologists. Right? This is a different type of practice area. And so as opposed to sort of proposing a team when when either for sort of submitting work, you know, a bid for work for the first time or as we're trying to be strategic about cost with existing clients, we sort of say, like, hey. This is not just, like, all me screaming from the rafters all the time. There are areas here where we need people who can go in and look at your metadata. There are areas where we need people who can come in and address, you know, retention schedules and and thoughtful I think we'll get Michelle back soon. Michelle, are you with us? While we wait for Michelle, Joe, Henry, and Jeff, why don't we turn to you? We've you've been seeing a shift to consolidating more work in house. Right? I think that everyone is aware of that. A recent survey of in house leaders by ACC and Everlaw, really underscores that trend. I think there's about 58% of legal departments expecting, a reduced reliance on on outside legal service providers, specifically, you the ability to do more work in house with JI, things like that. You you all said it all starts with planting the seed of having an in house team that is the the nexus of all litigation work. Joe Henry, can can you describe what that looks like, you know, being the nexus for all litigation or discovery work? Yeah. Or at least I can describe sort of one facet of it, or one manifestation of it. And, you know, I think, Michelle demonstrated very admirably for us that the hallmark of a truly effective internal team is is being able to deal with the unexpected. Right? You know, being adaptable. And that's something that I would I would recommend as an area of focus. If you're looking to build an in house team, you wanna have one that's flexible, one that can take on kind of anything that the that the litigation, portfolio of your company might need and then and then even expand beyond that. But that being said, I wouldn't recommend trying to, take everything across the entire EDRM all at once. I would say that you wanna start very small. Right? And Nexis starts with a seed, like you said, and then it grows from from there. Ideally, you would wanna find a specific area of focus, maybe something within the EDRM, or or a litigation workflow that is a pain point for your company, for your organization. And then, find the places where you can offer the greatest return on investments with the team that you have. And as Michelle said, you may not have a team entirely of lawyers. Probably, ideally, you shouldn't have a team entirely of lawyers, but you may be pulling resources from a number of different groups, especially as you are starting to build a dedicated team. So your operations partners, your IT partners, your records management or information governance or data security partners. Right? All of them can provide resources that help to start to show that value, show that return on investment. Here at Nationwide, again, we as as you mentioned, we have a very robust in house discovery team, but it wasn't always like that. We started twenty years ago with a relatively narrow mission, and that was to provide some consistency, across data collection and productions. So we were looking just at the review and production, kind of right hand side of the EDRM. And then over the years, we grew blossomed into a much, bigger internal team handling legal holds, handling information governance issues, handling privacy and compliance issues. Right? And so you wanna you wanna get a foothold and then start building off of that foothold. One thing I mentioned earlier is that your your ediscovery group has but is probably as the the ultimate consumers of enterprise data. They're prob they have probably the best data map of your company because they know every different business unit. They know all the different custodians of the data stewards, the people who own the data, the people who create the data, and they understand how or they what they may need to understand. They're building a constant data map with every case showing how data is flowing from one system to another, how it's connecting the the nature and type of information that there is. And so building off of that strength is something that I would recommend, whether it be data preservation for legal holds, collections, subpoena work. Right? Whatever that pain point is where you can show the greatest ROI, that's where I would begin. And most critically, no matter where you start, ensuring that you are keeping records and reporting, documenting the work that you're doing. Right? You wanna become the go to team for dashboarding, data, data reporting, or or KPIs showing that return on investment. Right? So, you know, we process this many terabytes of data in the last six months of the last year, and it would have cost this much to send it out to an outside vendor or to have our outside counsel look at it. Instead, we did it, you know, instead of a thousand hours, it took two hundred hours, and here's the cost savings. Right? You want to show tell that story to your leadership to start to build that reputation, that brand as a trusted partner, a trusted source of litigation support work or a data governance expertise or what have you. Right? Simultaneously, build relationships with other teams. Right? Don't just see them as custodians or people who happen to have data. These are your partners. These are your collaborators. And when you reach out to them to establish a relationship to help collect or identify information, preserve data for litigation, you build that that relationship so that in the future, they might reach out back to you when they have a migration project or a data remediation project or they have questions about compliance. All of a sudden, they are actually sending you work, but it's not litigation work. Right? But they're proving your value, to your leadership, to the company by becoming dependent upon you as an in house team, as experts in the life cycle of data. And so that's something that I think you really can't, it's it's a non traditional sort of litigation function. Right? But it's something that is is vitally important for someone who wants to show the importance of of the continued existence or the the growth of an in house team. Yeah. You know, and you mentioned about tracking metrics to be able to show that ROI over time. And it's interesting you mentioned that because so many folks, if they don't have any type of process, technology, or something centralized and repeatable internally, they often don't know what that cost is. It's buried in invoices. It's splayed all out across multiple parties. So that control, that locus of control being internal just even allows you to be able to track those metrics. Right? Jeff, I and I'll ask you something similar or similar question. I I would like to hear your point of view on where do you think is a a good place to start when you're looking to build out an internal program, whether you're in a nationwide, you're a company that has three announced councils and maybe a 25% of the discovery that you guys have a year? Sure. I'm going to, kind of hit the flip side to some of what Joel Henry talked about. And besides looking at what your pain points are, I think one of the keys is starting with identifying what you do know. What are some of the things that you already do well? What are some of the areas of expertise that you have in house? I think that in addition to looking to shore up those pinpoints and, weaknesses in your process, another way to approach it is to, start with building on your strengths. There are people in your organization who know things that nobody else knows, whether it's just their day to day job, whether it's what happens after they do their day to day job. So the more that you understand your internal team, the easier it is to start to identify that starting point. And those are the building blocks that you're going to use. At that point, it gives you a chance to figure out where you might need to add expertise, where you will have to reach out to supplement, but also where you don't. So I think the more that you can take full advantage of the folks that you have, of the institutional knowledge that you have, the better place you're going to be to start to build out. Yeah. Thank you. And and I guess one last question before we move for, Joe. You and Jeff both talked about having those internal metrics to be able to to prove out the ROI of the program you have internally. Can you share just what some of those metrics are that that you track that are believable by leadership and folks who may not be baptized in the eDiscovery waters, so to speak. Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, kind of piggybacking on what Jeff said, it is a challenge. Right? You're you're building you're flying the plane and building the plane at the same time. Right? But you wanna tell that story that convinces your leadership, the people who are controlling the purse strings, that there is a better value proposition in change than in maintaining the status quo. So what does that look like? So when when it comes to eDiscovery, right, we think in terms of documents or if we think in terms of records. Right? So it's you know, what what are the dollars per record that you are saving? What would it have cost? You look at your data universe. Right? You start with a particular, set of set of of documents, a certain size, so many gigabytes, so many, records. And then you see, okay. Because of this internal work that we did, we used early case assessment to remove 90 of that information. And then we ran search terms. And then we deduced, and then we denisted. Right? And we ended up with a review set that was a smaller fraction. So here's that cost avoidance to start with of this large amount of data that never had to be hosted, never had to be processed, never had to be looked at by council. Right? And then we ran search terms, and we narrowed it even further. And then we produced it, and we managed the review, first level, second level, privilege review. Right? We didn't have to pay outside counsel to do that. Every single hour that you are saving, that's that's internal work that's already been allocated against the budget of your company, that's cost savings. In addition to to, you know, your your the cost savings of billable hours, the avoidance when it comes to data remediation, there's also just the internal storage cost or external storage cost of hosted data. You can look at if you are getting involved in information governance, you can look at the amount of information that you are authorizing for release or purge per year and say, this is data that no longer exists within our company. Not only are we paying do we no longer have to pay, you know, so many cents per gigabyte per month to put it in how in cloud storage, but we are also no longer subject to exposure risk because we don't have to you know, we this data can't hurt us, can't help us either. Right? But it doesn't exist anymore. We don't have any ediscovery costs associated with it. Right? Because as you know, if you overpreserve, data and there's a litigation matter that comes up, all of a sudden, it's in scope. It has to be collected, reviewed, and produced. And so every record, every gigabyte that no longer exists is one, you know, that's that's, savings for your company. Yeah. And so, I mean, great points. And and, Michelle, I wanna turn to you and ask you something. We we keep talking about how do you be more self sufficient and self sustaining in house, but that that doesn't mean you're this closed door ecosystem, and I don't need anyone else. It means having a more effective relationship, I think, with your partners and law firms. So can what role can outside counsel like yourself play in helping streamline some of these process, cut efficiencies? You know, is it a a help building a foundation of templates, a a playbook, the privilege considerations, and what are the top things in your mind? Sure. And if I phrase, somebody and what I'm saying in a very graceful and and constructive way, and I hope I will freeze in a nice position, I I would say that figuring out what has happened well, what has gone well, and putting that into whether it's a playbook, whether it's some sort of, you know, series of templates, having something that we know is going to be successful and set up teams for success in litigation, investigations, whatever it is, that is gonna be incredibly useful. And and similarly to something Jeff said, we know something has not gone well. That's great too. Right? Because something that could be really good advice for one client might be really, really not so great advice for another client, and we have to find bespoke solutions to challenges. We can't just sort of say, like, hey. It works great over here. We'll do it this way here too. Right? So figuring out what historically has gone well, where there historically have maybe been some some challenges or or or some things we wish we could take back and and do over, and then setting up templates, good governance orders. Right? Governance orders that are gonna meet the needs of your client and and address the types of data that they have. Similarly to something Joe Mansfield said, I am a big fan. I know spallation is, like, a terrifying word, but I'm actually a big fan of defensible deletion. I have yet to find a client who is helped in litigation by having too much stuff. So if there are good times and strategic defensible times to set up retention records, strategies that allow for defensible deletion of records that no longer need to be kept, I cannot put enough of an emphasis on how important that is to do. Not just to Joe Mansfield point about, oh my gosh, we have, you know, so much stuff for litigation that we have to collect and review and produce, but also with the ever increasing cybersecurity risks that companies face. Having too much stuff means there's all the more stuff if you suffer any sort of data breach or infiltration, exfiltration, that that getting rid of things we don't need to keep for any longer than we absolutely have to keep them is something that's really important. And so I think going in, talking to clients saying, hey. You might have different types of matters with different types of outside counsel. We as discovery counsel, as information governance counsel can come in and help you try to eliminate or minimize, you know, duplication of efforts, inconsistency across efforts, and coming up with strategies for data minimization and consistent calls and discovery with respect to data that can help you keep your cost more reasonable. Yeah. And and could you briefly share what are the types of clients that you see that would you know, some clients might strive to do some of that on their own, and a lot of folks would hire a third party to come in and do that work. Do you see a difference between those two types of clients of which ones want to bring in a third party to advise on this versus the folks that are trying to do a lot of this, work internally? I think with as with all ediscovery, it's such a horrible, annoying answer, but it really depends. Right? It depends on if they're just basing down, like, so much litigation and they're seeing so much, like, duplication of discovery spend across multiple outside counsel that they're like, hold on. Let let me bring in discovery counsel to help work with, like, the virtual offer, right, to help talk to these different people who are maybe handling stuff differently and see if we can't kind of do it in one more strategic, comprehensive way from jump. We also see clients multinational clients who have different data regulations and, you know, different parts of the of the globe and seeing how they might have to deal with cross border discovery issues, different types of data retention obligations or data destruction obligations that they might have, there tends to be a little more interest in having us come on board and help them navigate that because it's a challenge. It's a challenge and and how we do things in The US might be very different from how they have to do things and they have data all over the world. Yep. That's helpful. Thank you. Well, we got just under nine minutes left. A couple quick questions I would I would love to ask before we, run out of time here today. But, Joe Henry, coming back to you, curious what you see as the biggest benefits of controlling the ediscovery process in house, the way that Nationwide has has built up over the years. Yeah. Yeah. I'll try to answer briefly. Right? So cost avoidance is certainly the the biggest benefit. Consistency, having control over the process are two other really major benefits. Right? Because you not only can you, templatize, use consistent approaches. Right? But, also, you know, as Michelle spoke to earlier in the in the webinar, you would know how things have specific records, specific data has been treated in the past, and you can start to build out recommendations, right, expertise, to help to partner with your outside counsel, and give them guidance on your company's approach to questions of, you know, business privilege as opposed to, legal privilege, right, etcetera. Data awareness is another critical one. No one's gonna be no one will understand your data better than your internal experts. And even when you do utilize outside, resources, as I counsel, right, they're gonna be depending upon those experts to point them in the right right direction. And so you save time, you save money, save yourself billable hours if you have those internal resources, providing that subject matter expertise. Yeah. Thanks. And, Jeff, asking a similar question to you, what do you see in your near your experience here is the biggest area of savings for in house teams when they they build out something like Nationwide has built out? I think one of the biggest sources is really just that knowledge that you retain and build over time. Michelle mentioned earlier that when you do something wrong, that's great too. And I think that was a really astute point because every time that you have a particular outcome, it's an opportunity to learn. Every time that you run into a particular data issue, it's an opportunity to learn how to do that better, to find ways to improve. And so, whereas when you, reach outside with, every issue or with, too many of your issues, you lose those built efficiencies. And so the more that you can continue that learning process, continue both retaining and building out your knowledge base. I think the more effectively you can address the new challenges as they come up. Yeah. Thank you. Well, with the few minutes we have left, I I wanna go around and have everyone do a quick round robin takeaway for the audience. What's what's one thing you'd like them to take away from today's webinar that can go start actioning within their own practices, or or company? So, Michelle, I'll I'll start with you. Can you share one takeaway that you would like the audience to leave with from from today's webinar? Actually, I would like the audience to think if they're like, it sounds cool and have discovery council come in and maybe help us strategize about some of these things or build out a playbook or think about how we might be doing things with more cost savings in mind, more efficiencies. That's a great thing to think. And we would love to talk to you about your needs. But at the same time, if you are a client who, like, nationwide already has, like, a very strong, robust, strategic group in play, You know, listen to those folks. Lean on those folks. And if you are outside counsel, really ask questions from those people as you are building out your discovery and your merits case. Right? As you're building your trial strategy, listen to the in house discovery team. They know quite a lot, and they are gonna help you find those documents that you need. Thank you. Joel Henry, how about you? I'm gonna cheat and actually have two main takeaways here, but adaptability is one and documentation is the other. Right? You wanna have a team that's flexible. You know you have subject matter expertise, and so you wanna be able to pivot to address the various needs of your company, the various litigation needs that you may have. And the more you do that, the better you will position yourself for, growth in terms of personal branding, and and your corporate team. And then the other side, documentation. It's the same side it's the other side of that same coin. Right? Show your value, have those KPIs, report what you're doing, and show how you make a difference to your company, and you will grow and be successful. Yeah. That's great. Thank you. Jeff, well, last but but not least, what is your one takeaway for everyone today? Rome was not built in a day, and neither was the Nationwide Discovery Management Unit. Your starting point is your starting point. And, you know, a an in house discovery team, you have some of the people there, but it's not something that you have. It's something you build over time. We are twenty years in still building and learning. Whatever your starting point is, that's your starting point. Understand what you have. Take that step, and it's something that is worth the time and energy to build out. Absolutely. Well, thank you all for your participation today. I know you got busy schedules, no white space on your calendars. But you took time. I have to to speak with everyone today, so thank you. And to all those that are, in the audience today, thank you so much for for joining us. Again, if you submitted any questions, we will, collect those questions and follow-up with you after the webinar. But thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah.