eDiscovery Leaders Live: Chris Haley of Troutman Pepper eMerge
Chris Haley, Director of Litigation Technology at Troutman Pepper eMerge, joins George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, for ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive.
Chris is responsible for the delivery of eDiscovery, litigation, and other legal technology services for Troutman Pepper and its subsidiary, Troutman Pepper eMerge. He is an important advocate of leveraging technology to improve legal services, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. Chris leads a team of technologists who provide advanced and innovative technology solutions to clients. He has provided trial presentation and consulting services to clients on hundreds of trials. Chris also evaluates new technologies that may assist clients, ensures that their team maintains the skills necessary to handle the ever-evolving landscape of eDiscovery, and designs and implements custom technical solutions to meet the firm’s clients’ needs. Chris is a frequent speaker on eDiscovery and legal technology topics and has made numerous CLE and law firm presentations. He often provides affidavits in both state and district courts regarding technology services and eDiscovery costs, and has testified in court as needed.
Chris talked about the firm and its subsidiary, discussing the merger that created the firm and the origins of eMerge, the scope and depth of their practice, and how they set themselves apart. He discussed their custom solutions team, how they deliver innovation, and what has made them successful – and what they do to help others as well.
Key Highlights
- [1:34] eMerge explained.
- [2:21] The merger of Troutman and Pepper and their eDiscovery groups.
- [3:27] The origins of eMerge.
- [4:59] The broad scope of what eMerge covers.
- [6:13] The breadth of eMerge’s reach within the firm.
- [7:13] The size and makeup of their group.
- [7:52] What work life looks like for eMerge attorneys.
- [8:56] What work life looks like for eMerge technologists.
- [9:19] eMerge’s data collection team.
- [10:17] eMerge’s legal technology team.
- [10:36] eMerge’s custom solutions team.
- [11:17] How they deliver innovation.
- [12:32] One of their recent innovations he is most proud of.
- [13:21] How amazing our industry is.
- [14:33] What makes eMerge so successful.
- [15:22] Exciting times for them.
- [15:38] What eMerge is working on now.
- [16:55] New technologies and the challenges they bring.
- [17:22] Ways to address those challenges.
- [19:28] Working internally compared to working with external clients.
- [21:02] Addressing proportionality.
- [22:27] Providing testimony.
- [24:03] Chris’ take on the state of industry.
- [25:05] What they are doing to find and develop new talent.
- [26:42] “See you at the top”.
- [27:53] The value of volunteering with ILTA and others.
Key Quotes
- “In a merger like ours you would hope that one plus one equals three and it did.”
- “Almost every practice in our firm now benefits from eMerge and the services that we provide – everything from information governance consulting, litigation readiness consulting, contract management, data privacy, obviously data breach review…, custom solutions and data rooms and corporate mergers and acquisitions….”
- “We felt strongly that we needed a data collection team, so we have a forensics collection team…. We don’t always do the collections for our clients but we can consult with them on doing it… And then we really felt like the collection paradigm has broken. So many times we were over collecting the data and by having a team and the tools we could be more surgical in our collections….”
- “We have a custom solutions team, which I also think is fairly unique to what we do at eMerge. But we felt strongly that every matter and every client is so different that we wanted to be able to innovate rapidly to help them deliver very bespoke and useful solutions on a matter-by-matter basis.”
- “How can we create solutions that bring those [AI] technologies to make them easy to use and apply in the legal industry, is something that’s a big focus of ours.”