Beth Thomas, Director of Litigation Technology and Support at Becker & Poliakoff, joins George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, for ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive.
Beth has over thirty years of experience as a litigation paralegal, specializing in evidence collection, organization, analysis, and procedures for use and admissions at trial and mediation and has extensive trial experience in both Federal and state courts. At Becker & Poliakoff, she led the introduction and implementation of the firm’s Uniform Case Management System for all litigation matters, including both physical file structure and electronic case management and created the firm’s litigation support department for the collection, processing, and organization of all case evidence. A Florida Registered Paralegal, Beth graduated in 1983 from Barry University, where she obtained her Certificate as a Paralegal.
Beth started by sharing how she got to where she is and what she does at her firm. She talked about Becker & Poliakoff’s uniform approach that allows them to handle diverse cases in a consistent manner, about the training, education, and support they provide to their attorneys, and the onboarding process they use to make sure that incoming attorneys and the matters they bring with them fit into that uniform approach. From there, Beth discussed their use of Reveal AI to tackle construction litigation’s more gnarly challenges, and how, with that technology, they are upping their eDiscovery game.
Key Highlights
- [2:35] Beth’s background, and her many-faceted role at Becker & Poliakoff.
- [5:14] How Beth juggles her many hats and balances competing demands.
- [7:50] Becker & Poliakoff “uniform approach”: handling diverse cases in a consistent manner.
- [11:15] How they apply their uniform system uniformly.
- [13:14] Becker & Poliakoff University: a systematic approach to educating attorneys when they come into the firm.
- [15:16] Support from the top.
- [15:45] New attorneys and eDiscovery: consistently and uniformly bringing attorneys and their matters onboard and into the firm’s system.
- [17:41] Training attorneys on using eDiscovery technology.
- [20:03] Using AI to take on construction litigation’s unique issues.
- [20:57] The advantages of using AI technology themselves.
- [21:37] A special construction litigation challenge: many thousands of photographs and very little information about them.
- [26:25] Adding new eDiscovery capabilities: better email threading.
- [28:06] Upping their game with better eDiscovery technology used throughout the life of a matter.
Key Quotes by Beth Thomas
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- “[My partners] are 100% [onboard], both educating the attorneys [about eDiscovery] but also providing the staff and the litigation support staff with the tools that they need to successfully represent our clients and our attorneys.”
- “I want [the attorneys] to have the best benefit of the tools that we have for the records that they are trying to get through and be the most cost-effective for the client at the same time.”
- “We have a large construction litigation practice. Those are the records that come in that really have unique issues that we can go in and utilize the AI tools to narrow down and cull down for us a significant relevant set of records for eyes on. That’s where we sit down, we go through the different issues, the different search criteria, the significant custodians, and then we let the machine do the rest.”
- “We’re running the tools, running the software, and letting the attorneys then go in and determine, ‘Is this the record set that I need or do we need to go back and finetune some of our criteria’.”
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- “There’s really this intersection between litigation, information governance, cybersecurity, but it starts with that information governance piece. If you tackle a piece of technology as you’re onboarding it within an organization to understand what the data points are what policy and process you can put around that piece of technology, it will pay dividends for you when you get to litigation, if you have a cybersecurity incident.”
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