eDiscovery Leaders Live: Jonathan Flood of HaystackID
Jonathan Flood, Senior Director of Data Automation and European Operations at HaystackID, joins George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, for ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive at Ireland’s Legal Tech Conference 2022 at Croke Park in Dublin.
Based in Dublin, Jonathan is a thought leader who has worked with top-tier law firms in Ireland, in addition to advising and supporting vendors, financial institutions, government agencies, and regulatory bodies in matters ranging from compliance audits to complex litigation. A recognized technologist and eDiscovery educator, Jonathan has an extensive portfolio of industry certifications with leading platforms ranging from Relativity to Reveal.
After sharing his background, Jonathan spent the rest of the episode focusing on data automation. He discussed what data automation looks like at HaystackID, what makes for effective data automation, and how the process of automating data can work. He offered examples of different projects they have undertaken, different ways they have gone about these projects, and the different levels of client involvement. Jonathan closed with thoughts on the challenges ahead the benefits to be obtained.
Key Highlights
- [1:18] Introducing Jonathan.
- [2:28] Experiences learned.
- [3:18] What it means to be Senior Director of Data Automation and what data automation means at HaystackID.
- [4:51] What the process of data automation looks like.
- [6:18] How far HaystackID is with its data automation voyage.
- [7:33] What makes for a good platform to work with for data automation.
- [8:57] Pursuing ever-better operational excellence.
- [11:02] Automating the 90%, identifying the 10%, and figuring out what to do with it.
- [13:06] Learning, from the 10%, what more to automate.
- [14:25] Pursuing uniform processes while working with “bespoke” data.
- [17:55] Behind-the-scenes compared with client-facing automation.
- [21:01] How much look and feel can differ from one automation project to another.
- [23:09] How actively involved clients are in data automation.
- [24:51] Some of the biggest challenges they face with automation.
- [28:00] The opportunities that automation presents.
Key Quotes
- “We’re data managers and we look after data in a life cycle…. Understanding the life cycle of data and how best to use and how best to leverage whatever information you can get is why we landed on data automation.”
- “What makes for a good tool [for data automation] is having open APIs that you can leverage [so that] basically any function that you can do in the platform you can do in the API….”
- “What [pursuing ever-better operational excellence] means to me is never stopping learning. You’re always trying to find where you can improve. Are you using the best tools? Are you using the best workflow? Where can you shave off difficult steps to make an improved workflow, save time, save money, ultimately give back our teams the time to go and do the hard stuff?”
- “I think the journey for clients and client services and for the people who are in the trenches every day dealing with new data and processes is you realize that, yes, your data is special and, yes, your case is different to everybody else’s but ultimately there are way more crossovers in data sets than there are differences.”
- “You operationalize the entire process and it becomes just a step in the project. It’s no longer we need to scope, we need to do all these things. That’s all just done as part of the project now.”