eDiscovery Leaders Live: Jeff Hirvela of Epiq
Jeff Hivela, a Senior Account Director at Epiq, joins George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, for ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive.
A senior account director with Epiq, Jeff has had a long tenure in the legal industry. Jeff started at ALC Legal Technologies in 2002, at a time when paper still was a major factor in discovery. He moved to Thomson Reuters in 2006, focusing on Westlaw. In 2009, Jeff joined Iris Data Services, now part of Epiq, and has worn multiple hats from individual contributor to manager and now consultant.
Jeff started by sharing his story, rising through the ranks from paper to managed services. From there, he gave us a quick tour of managed services. Jeff then delved into the details, taking us from the early days of managed services as IaaS, through the expansion to multi-tenant solutions, and into the analytics offerings, including AI models, that drive managed services today. Next, Jeff discussed some of the myriad ways managed services are evolving, expanding, and morphing – and closed with his thoughts on where managed services might be headed tomorrow.
Key Highlights
- [3:02] Jeff’s story: Coming up through the ranks of the industry.
- [4:58] A quick tour of managed services from the early days at Iris to today.
- [7:49] Managed services in the early days: infrastructure as a service.
- [9:09] Early evolution in managed services: Offering multi-tenant solutions.
- [9:53] Adding analytics to managed services.
- [10:29] Using AI model libraries through managed services.
- [11:44] The progression to integrating different technologies.
- [12:18] Offering a dynamic set of capabilities to meet specific client needs.
- [15:53] Pushing past the status quo: tackling new data sources, moving further into information governance.
- [21:02] Expanding both the “managed” and the “services” sides of managed services – and added an even greater emphasis on consultative services.
- [22:55] Helping clients make more effective use of AI models.
- [25:24] Gazing into the crystal ball: The future of managed services.
Key Quotes by Jeff Hirvela
- “The original managed services were more of an infrastructure as a service…. It really started with carving out dedicated service space, dedicated software licenses, the processes and the technologies around that, and the personnel to make everything work.”
- “[We] want to encourage the use of [AI model libraries] on a individual basis with each of our partner managed services clients. Yes, we have some generic libraries, but we really want to partner and make sure this is the law firm X, the corporation Y’s, way of doing things.”
- “As a company, a big focus for us right now is to offer that suite of services at a predictable rate versus ‘Pick one and we’ll build around it.’”
- “We want to empower. We want to encourage that our partners are as autonomous as they would like to be.”
- “[AI models] are essential for managing what we work with on a day-to-day basis.”
- “You’re seeing extremely intelligent people now on both sides, data scientists popping up everywhere…. I’m constantly amazed by just the raw talent and the amount of data-scientist-level expertise that’s being brought to this.”