eDiscovery Leaders Live: Kelly Friedman of BLG
Kelly Friedman, Senior Counsel and National Leader of Beyond eDiscovery, a BLG Beyond business, joins George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, for ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive.
Kelly is an experienced litigator with expertise in data management issues, including eDiscovery, cybersecurity and privacy. She is recognized for her eDiscovery expertise and leverages over two decades of litigation experience to bring a distinctively strategic approach to planning and executing discovery projects.
Kelly is a member of Subcommittee 27, ISO/IEC JTC1 – that stands for a joint technical committee of the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission. She also is a member of the Digital Evidence and Electronic Discovery Committee, which develops model documents to guide litigators and the judiciary in Ontario with respect to e-discovery issues.
Before joining BLG, Kelly was a litigation associate at Goodmans; a partner at Ogilvy Renault, which now is Norton Rose Fulbright; and then a partner at DLA Piper (Canada). Kelly has a bachelor's degree from McGill and a LLB from the University of Toronto.
Kelly started the discussion going over how she got to where she is today. She addressed the importance of focusing on facts, not just law, and the value of actual litigation experience. Kelly gave examples of what she and her team are able to do with today’s AI technologies and talked about the head start those tools can provide. She discussed, as well, challenges such as the misalignment between what too many lawyers see as the burden of eDiscovery, with the ways in which eDiscovery tools give her and her team a head start. Kelly ended with one final suggestion: give your eDiscovery specialists a chance to show what they can do for you. You just might be amazed.
Key Highlights
- [3:01] Kelly’s history, experience, and current role.
- [3:36] The importance of facts and how they led Kelly to eDiscovery.
- [5:31] Challenges and issues as we moved from paper to electronic content.
- [7:10] Better tools but more difficult legal calls.
- [8:44] The skill set that is really hard to find.
- [11:05] The critical value of litigation experience.
- [13:18] The difficulty of performing document review if you have never prepped cases for trial.
- [15:55] The new things Kelly and her team can do with today’s eDiscovery technology.
- [18:40] What today’s AI tools can do for us – if we will just let them.
- [19:05] Powerful things modern tools do to give Kelly and her team a real head start.
- [21:00] Addressing the misalignment between eDiscovery costs and attorney interests.
- [23:25] How to make a persuasive argument for using eDiscovery tools.
- [26:00] eDiscovery technology adoption rates at her firm.
- [28:12] Proportionality: A history of balancing in Canada.
Key Quotes by Kelly Friedman
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- “I came out of law school probably like most law students really naïve, thinking the law was everything, and then very quickly learned that facts really are everything. The law takes really a more role.”
- “Our technologies today do a ton of work but what remains difficult is those calls. Those legal judgment calls are always extremely important and in the digital context have not gotten easier – In fact have gotten more difficult – because there’s so much more in terms of volume of data.”
- “I really think that the key is people…. You need to down rabbit holes, go where the technology takes you, so you need a combination of strong technology skills in terms of the functionality and being able to use the technology available to you, but more important to that a level of curiosity to really investigate. That is the skill set that is really hard to find.”
- “Most importantly for me is, the people who are doing the analysis and the document review for production have to have had litigation experience…. You can’t make really good legal decisions if you don’t understand how the evidence is going to have to be used at the end of the day.”
- “Now, the technology is so good that we don’t need the low-level review anymore, what we used to call first level review.”
- “The artificial intelligence functionality that we find in the tools now is quite incredible…. They are tools to help you distill the facts and they are incredibly helpful tools.”
- “What I always say is, ‘A lot of these technologies are Ferraris but people are driving the like Hondas’.”
- “Let me assess your data, give me 10 hours with this four million documents, and I will lay out for you specific small sets of documents that are crucial for you to look at first.”