eDiscovery Leaders Live: Kassi Burns, Rose Jones, and Jen Polito from King & Spalding
Rose Jones, Kassi Burns, and Jen Polito, all of King & Spalding, join George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, for ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive.
Rose Jones is a partner at King & Spalding and a return guest on eDiscovery Leaders Live. Rose co-leads King & Spalding’s Legal 500 Tier 1 ranked e-discovery practice. Dedicated to understanding and managing the intersection of legal and technical issues that now largely dominate American and global litigation, data breach response, and government investigations, Rose devotes her entire practice to crisis management, eData, and technology.
Kassi Burns is a senior attorney in King & Spalding’s E-Discovery practice. Kassi is a skilled E-Discovery practitioner with more than 13 years of progressive experience advising corporate clients and legal professionals on E-Discovery best practices and the integration of technology and the law. Her diverse background ranges from transactional law, E-Discovery (technical and managed review), and legal operations.
Jen Polito is summer intern with King & Spalding. A rising 3rd year law student at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, Jen is a CALI Award recipient for Legal Analysis and Writing. She previously served as a legal extern with the Supreme Court of Ohio and a Project Intern with the Office of the New York State Attorney General. Prior to law school, Jen was a high school English teacher and Teach for America Corps Member.
Rose, Kassi, and Jen took us in a new direction, looking at three situations where eDiscovery has been trending on Twitter: Real Housewives, Elizabeth Holmes & Theranos, and Elizabeth Holmes & Theranos. Kassi stepped us through each scenario, with Rose and Jen offering commentary, tying those trending-on-Twitter matters with our world of eDiscovery and how to explain what we do to the uninitiated.
Key Highlights
- [3:25] Part 1: The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills videos.
- [5:05] Erika Jane and Tom Girardi, Bravo, and their eDiscovery issues: a starter kit for explaining what we do.
- [8:13] Using the Real Housewives videos to explain discoverability, discoverability risks, data sources, and what we do with that data.
- [9:43] How these examples help law students better understand what eDiscovery is.
- [10:58] eDiscovery: an area of interest to law students. And a shout out to the eDiscovery programs and classes offered by the likes of Bill Hamilton at UF Law and Amy Sellars at The Ohio State University.
- [12:54] Part 2: Elizabeth Holmes & Theranos hard-to-access custom database.
- [15:56] The challenges of proprietary systems.
- [17:17] Working with databases.
- [19:42] Part 3: Johnny Depp & Amber Heard text messages: beware the texts you send.
- [24:05] And that includes messages in collaboration platforms.
- [25:00] A rare example of an eDiscovery expert witness testifying at trial: testimony about metadata.
- [26:42] A rare example of a fact witness talking about metadata without prompting: a strategic move?
- [27:51] How these three examples help Kassi, Rose, and Ken explain what they do.
- [28:08] Kassi: “My job is I find the buried treasure…. If you can use these as an example, people will remember that.”
- [28:32] Rose: “These three examples are really helpful to explain in a real-life situation the types of information that we’re looking for.”
- [28:58] Jen: “Again I do not watch these shows, but I do definitely know what we do and it is an aspect of every single trial that you would have to conduct.”
Key Quotes by Kassi Burns, Rose Jones, & Jen Polito
- “From my perspective, I think the key takeaway is, in the world we live in today, everything is taped. Whether or not you are a real housewife and have video cameras following you, most likely you are following yourself and posting videos and others are posting videos of you.” – Rose
- “Even law students really don’t understand what eDiscovery is until they actually start practicing so having these things actually come up in things we’re seeing online or Twitter or Instagram is actually really helpful for us… It’s interesting because this is how we actually find out the real evidence of what’s happening.” – Jen
- “Having been doing this for about 20 years, what’s really amazing to me is we’re sitting here with a law student who’s interested in eDiscovery and wanted to join our practice as a law student.” – Rose
- “We’re seeing cell phone and text message data being requested more and more often because of COVID…. People are being well trained by their departments – their HR, their legal departments –this is the proper behavior in work email but people don’t feel that way with text messages.” - Kassi