Name: Empowering Your Teams: How Paralegals Can Drive Success with Ediscovery Technology Firm-Wide
Uploaded: 2025-04-09T16:46:08.554Z
Duration: 30 min 4 s
Description: Empowering Your Teams: How Paralegals Can Drive Success with Ediscovery Technology Firm-Wide

Transcript for "Empowering Your Teams: How Paralegals Can Drive Success with Ediscovery Technology Firm-Wide": Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. My name is John McIntyre, and I will be the host for today's webinar. Today, we have a very special session planned for you. We'll be joined by one of our esteemed customers, Ellie, along with her customer success manager, Horace, to hear firsthand what it's like to work with Everlaw. We believe that hearing directly from our customers is the best way to learn about their experience with a product. So today, you'll get to hear firsthand about how our platform has helped the team streamline their workflows, collaborate more efficiently, and ultimately achieve better results for their clients. In this session, we'll cover how Ellie decided on Everlaw, how the firm integrated our platform into their existing workflows, and how they ensured their attorneys were adequately trained on our product. You'll also hear about the importance of collaboration within their firm and how implementing Everlaw has aided with that. Before we begin, let's take care of a few housekeeping items. If you have any questions for our speakers during the webinar, feel free to put them in the q and a widget on your screen, and we'll follow-up with those offline after our webinar today. We'll also be sharing a link to the recorded version of this webinar with you shortly after it ends. So if you miss any part of the webinar or you just wanna revisit it later, don't worry. We've got you covered. But without further ado, I'm excited to hand it over to our speakers, Ellie and Horace. Alright. So hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We're so excited to be spending some time talking with you today. My name is Horace Labiga, and I'm from Everlaw customer success team. I've been at Everlaw for three years, and I have the pleasure of working closely with our customers to achieve their goals. Today, I'm joined by one of my favorite customers, Elly Oxman, who will be sharing about her personal experience as well as the impact Everlaw has made to their firm. I've been fortunate to have a front row seat to watch what Elly has been able to accomplish. Elly, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Could you start out by giving us a quick introduction and share about what is it that you do? Of course. Thank you for having me. My name is Elly, and I'm a paralegal at Levy, Vinik, Burrell, Hyams. We're a small plaintiff side employment law firm based in Oakland, California. 1 of the things that sets us apart is that, all of the partners work collaboratively together, so that's something unique to us. That's really cool. And one thing I wanted to highlight is that your firm is both women owned and women led. Is that correct? Could you share with us a bit more about that? Yeah. That that is correct. We have four partners, three associated attorneys, and three of counsel attorneys. All of them are women. Then we have two legal assistants and a paralegal. That's me. So, yes, the firm is majority women. That's awesome to see. Now was that a specific goal of the firm, or did it just kind of happen to work out that way? So when the firm started, there were three of the attorneys were already working together, and then they met, one of the other attorneys and decided to create this firm specifically with the goal of being collaborative, but also with the goal of being able to mentor other women and minorities to rise up in the field of law. Let's dive a bit deeper, shall we? Could you share more about what you do in your role at Levy Vinick Burrell Hyams? Sure. So as a paralegal, my overall role is to support the attorneys in any way that they need. But the two primary roles that I play are first to field all of the intake forms that we receive or intake calls request, and second is to spearhead our ediscovery process. Awesome. And when did you first start at? So I started started with the firm in 2018, so coming up on five years now. Wow. Five years is really impressive. So let's start at the beginning. How did you get into this role, and was it something you were looking you were always looking to get into, or did it sort of fall in place? So it sort of came upon me. When I started working here, I was actually a legal assistant. And one day, I overheard the partners talking about how they thought they might need to to, hire a paralegal to, take care of all the ediscovery processes. And I just raised my hand, and said, hey. I'll do that. So I attended paralegal school, studied deep discovery, and got my certificate. That's awesome. I share a similar story too. Like, when I started, I didn't even know what ediscovery was, but here we are now. Well so while in the process of becoming a paralegal, did you take any specific courses for ediscovery? Yes. So at the time, I was looking at all the programs in the Bay Area that offered paralegal certificates, and there was only one that offered a specific ediscovery course. All the other programs, you know, ediscovery was just a topic that was covered in the regular discovery class. So I ended up going to Cal State East Bay because that was the only, program that had a specific course even though it was an elective, but they had a specific course on ediscovery. Interesting. So shifting focus a bit, I'd love to hear I'd love for you to share some of the characteristics of your firm, starting with challenges. Specifically, being a smaller size firm, how has this in some ways been an advantage and in some ways a disadvantage? So it really helps that, pretty much everyone in the firm works on Everlaw. Some of the the attorneys have specific ways that they like to do things, and some of them like to do all the everything by themselves. And I just try to make sure that they're doing things correctly. But I'm the point person for all things Everlaw at the firm, so they will you know, if anybody has any issues or any questions, they'll come to me first. And if I can't answer it, then I'll contact customer support and get an answer for them. We started working with EverLog just before the pandemic lockdown, and it was a bit of a learning curve with everyone learning on their own remotely. But everyone embraced using it, just because it made our lives so much easier. Awesome. So it sounds to me like both the implementation and communication were more streamlined because of your team size. Mhmm. So take me back to whenever law was first implemented at your firm. What did that process look like, and how did it go? It was pretty easy. In the beginning, we had some firm wide Zooms to talk about Everlaw and how are we gonna use it and implement it. Then we had an, meeting with an Everlaw representative, which I can't remember that person's name right now. But they provided us with a training plan. Then it was, like, me and one other person were told, like, okay. Learn this and then teach us about it. It's also that you took the initiative to learn Everlaw on your own and then kind of teach it to the rest of your firm. Can you describe what that process was like, and were they receptive to it? Oh, they were very receptive to it. So I went through a lot of the live training and watched a large number of the videos, and then I met with people one on one over Zoom to walk through it and make sure that they knew it well. Awesome. So during that process of transferring your knowledge of Everlaw to the rest of the team, was there a point where they saw the light? Did they eventually realize this is something that will really make my life easier? I think they already knew that it was gonna make their life easier. It was just a a matter of implementing it. But, yeah, I mean, like I said, the partners and well, all of the attorneys, but especially the partners, work collaboratively. So when they made a decision, it was kinda like everyone was on board. And then at that point, we had only two associates, and they were totally in. They totally wanted to do this because of being able to save time doing searches instead of, like, combing through PDFs through Adobe, which is what we did before. Saving time is the biggest asset to effective document management and being able to go through all of the documents, weed out the ones that we don't want in order to find the ones that we do. Just the less time that we spend doing that, it just makes a huge difference to us. Saving time is a is a good thing. So let's move along to the time after you you've implemented Everlaw. How did your processes change now compared to before? For instance, did you need to make changes to the way you intake, review, or produce documents? So in the beginning, we implemented a process for uploading data. We would do a first pass, coding, and then the attorneys would review the the documents and apply more coding. Then for productions, we place documents that we wanna produce. They would place them in a into a binder, and then I would run the production. Great. And now that you've had Everlaw for several years, have your processes changed very much over time? A little bit. But well, there are a couple of attorneys that will do their own uploads and run their own productions. We have some attorneys who like to share productions within Everlaw, and others who want me to download the, download the production to Dropbox and then share a Dropbox link to the production. Got it. Well, it's great that the attorneys are feeling more empowered to take this process into their own hands. How has that impacted your day to day? Like, has it created more work for you? Not really. You know, they've been really great. The the I think there was, like, one instance where I discovered that one of the attorneys was uploading process documents as native documents. But I just called her up and explained why you shouldn't do that, and it was an easy fix. She was totally amenable to it, and it was just like, you know, okay. Good to go. Good to know. Alright. So we often hear from customers about the monumental change in their quality of life when they transition from either an older tool or even no eDiscovery tool to Everlaw. Can you describe the impact your team felt when you moved to Everlaw? Oh, there was a huge impact. As I said, the time saving aspect of it, being able to search documents while you're in the middle of a depot, being able to do one search and find all these other documents that are related to it. You know, back when I first started, we didn't have any sort of an eDiscovery tool, and we were having to search through documents using the tools in Adobe. So whereas now, you know, we can upload a bunch of documents, and then no matter what format they're in, I you know, if they're in the right format while you upload it, like text strings, emails, but mostly text strings and, you know, Slack even, upload them to Everlaw, and they're in somewhat of the same format as they were. Like, a text string looks like a text string. So it just saves so much more time, and it makes so much more sense, as far as being able to search and find the document that you need quickly. That's invaluable. Definitely see the value there. In addition to saving time, what's been the biggest impact to your team's efficiency from using the tool? I'd say collaborating. We have a lot of cases that we do with co counsel or of counsel, and just Everlaw makes it easy to add them to a project so that they can assist with the review and with coding, and being able to, you know, message within the platform. Just having that ability to add them is just incredibly helpful. Awesome. And looking more outward, do you have a sense for how your workflows and tools compare to others other firms of your size? What are your thoughts on other firms that you know of that aren't using any discovery tool yet? So from what I know of the attorneys who have talked to their colleagues, in the same field, like, in in employment law, those colleagues, they understand how any discovery tool would help them. It's just that for small or solo firms, the cost is prohibitive at this time, which I think is, you know, part of the reason we do so many cases with co counsel and of counsel, because the solo attorneys that we work with don't necessarily get the opportunity get the opportunity to use the tools unless they're on a case with us. Got it. And looking at the growing size and complexity of cases you've observed, do you think that at some point those firms are going to realize that they can't get by without a solution like Everlaw? Yeah. I think so. Just because the growth in the emerging types of data and the increase in the number of documents produced, I think at some point, it will force them to use at least some type of ediscovery tool. From our vantage point, we're noticing more and more customers dealing with an ever growing amount of documents on their cases. It seems the overall trend is that document volumes will only continue to grow. Can you share what you've observed on your cases? So yeah. I mean, in our cases, the number of documents being produced by a co opposing counsel has grown exponentially. And, not even opposing opposing counsel, but, like, all parties, even our clients have data in the form of Slack, text, email, all different formats. And it's making it essential for firms to have ediscovery tools available. But, you know, like I said, at this point, the cost is the barrier to adoption for small firms. You bring up a really good point there. So not only has the number of documents been growing, but the complexity too in terms of the different file formats. Can you share about the growth over time and the types of file types that you've seen? So the number of documents the types of documents, they've been steadily increasing. I think it depends on the type of organization that our clients work with. Some of our clients work for tech tech companies where there's a huge number of documents across many types of platforms. Although, honestly, I would say overall, it's steadily increasing no matter what field our clients are employed in. So while we're on this topic of, documents increasing, I've noticed that your team has been able to review tens of thousands of documents in the last year alone. Thinking about the team, your size, the number of documents, that's a lot of documents, especially if we were to look at it in terms of documents per person. So despite the ever increasing number of documents, it's amazing to see how you've been able to manage it. It It really speaks to what your team's been able to accomplish. So congrats to you and your team. Thanks. So I know we've covered a lot of different topics during our conversation today from learning about your firm to how how you implemented Everlaw to the changing landscape of ediscovery. We wanna turn our attention to what's next and hear about your outlook. So to that point, we enjoy finding out how our customers first learned or first heard about Everlaw. Could you share how you first heard of us? Absolutely. I'm not sure exactly how the firm first heard of Everlaw. I believe that we used it for one case back in, I believe, 2016. And, after that, we used some other platforms just to find out what the right fit for us was, and we returned to Everlaw in 2020. While we were doing our research, we, you know, we did a bunch of, like, internal research presentations about different platforms. There were three of us who researched separate vendors, and each one of us did a presentation on the vendor that they researched. And the partners decided that as far as features and cost, Everlaw was the best fit for our needs. And we've been with you ever since, and we're very happy with Everlaw. Glad to hear that. We are happy to have you as a customer. So next, I'd be interested to hear what's next. Are there any tools in Everlaw that you might be excited to learn about over the next year or any new releases that have interest you? Yeah. So I think two of the features that I really wanna know about, but I still haven't had quite the time to dig into them deeply, is clustering and story builder. I did see that there was a release recently about the Zoom connectors, which I think will come in very handy for us. But going back to story builder, I think a couple of the attorneys have dabbled at it, but I wanna really learn it and be able to hold some sort of, like, a lunchtime seminar about how to use it efficiently and how it could be a real game changer for us. That's awesome to hear. I've actually had several customers bring up story builder in conversations lately, so it's something that's definitely top of mind, and rightly so. I've seen customers build it into their workflows, both pre and postproduction. So whether it's creating timelines, document exhibits, or collaborating in drafts, I'm excited that you're interested and excited to see what you'll be able to do with it. Mhmm. Alright. So for my last question for you today, how do you think your role is going to change over the next five to ten years? I think my focus is going to be sort of keeping up with all the different data types that come out as well as honing my skills with AI generated searching and coding. So, basically, becoming even more of a bridge to the new technology, that's gonna tackle ever growing data. That's great to hear, and we're excited to continue to work with you in the future. Thank you so much for your time today, Elly. We really appreciate it. Oh, you're very welcome, Horace. It's a pleasure working with you. So Thank you so much, Elly and Horace, for sharing your insights and experiences with us today. It was truly enlightening to hear how Everlast has made such a difference for your firm. We hope that this webinar has given you a better understanding of what it's like to partner with Everlaw and how our platform can help streamline your workflows, promote collaboration, and achieve better outcomes for your clients. If you're interested in learning more about what our customers have to say about Everlaw, please check out the resources section on your screen where you can read our g two reviews or our customer success stories. And if you wanna speak directly with someone from Everlaw, you can hit the talk to sales button to learn more about how we can help your firm. Lastly, we wanna thank ASEDS for hosting this session and providing us with the opportunity to connect with you all. We appreciate your time and attention today, and we hope that you have a great rest of your day. Thank you for joining us.