Lee Morrissey, Managing Director, Managed Legal Services at Johnson Hana, 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.
Lee has been at Johnson Hana, Ireland’s first alternative legal service provider, for about three years. With undergraduate training in law and a background in large-scale technology consulting and project management, Lee joined Johnson Hana because he was eager to see where that journey would go.
Lee talked about his background and the formation and growth of Johnson Hana. He then turned to an area of special interest to him, delivery methodologies, first describing what he means by that term and then offering examples. Lee tied delivery models back to eDiscovery, talked about what Johnson Hana offers in that arena and then their experience with AI models. He returned to Johnson Hana, looking at its two main divisions, its workforce, and its future. Lee then wrapped up the discussion talking about key areas of expansion for the company.
Key Highlights
- [1:40] Introducing Lee, Johnson Hana, and Lee’s role at Johnson Hana.
- [1:51] Johnson Hana’s formation and focus.
- [2:46] Johnson Hana’s three main pillars: expert lawyer consultants, best-in-class technology, and project management.
- [3:30] Lee’s background and why he joined Johnson Hana.
- [4:12] Johnson Han’s second round of fundraising.
- [4:27] The next stage: double-down in the Irish market and expand abroad.
- [5:21] Delivery methodologies: combining existing discovery structures such as EDRM with methodologies outside the industry such as Agile sprints.
- [6:15] One example: quick prototyping for complex projects.
- [7:20] The advantages of an Agile delivery model.
- [7:40] How Agile is like early case assessment.
- [8:00] Another example: AI-enabled contract review with standard contractual clauses.
- [9:00] Marrying a process mindset, people outside the legal sphere, and inhouse and subject matter experts.
- [9:50] Tying it back to eDiscovery.
- [10:58] Using deeper reporting such as burndown charts and AI models to identify speed up eDiscovery.
- [12:25] Their experience with reusable AI models.
- [12:47] Building their own AI models.
- [13:32] Comparing their two divisions: legal services and legal solutions.
- [15:15] Managed legal services: driving process discipline.
- [16:30] Having a great and varied workforce.
- [17:58] Looking to the company’s future.
- [19:40] What type of client he likes working with best.
- [20:43] Areas of expansion: DSARs and GDPR.
- [22:05] Areas of expansion: Other repeatable access requests.
- [22:53] Areas of expansion: Freedom of Information (FOIA) and access to information on environment (AIE) requests.
- [23:30] Areas of expansion: contract lifecycle management and contract review.
- [23:58] Back to DSARs.
Key Quotes
- “[With the additional funding] we can bring [our three unique selling points] to other geographies and other jurisdictions for some of our clients and they’re really seeing the value of that already.”
- “One sprint is enough to prove the concept for the client, allow them a tangible deliverable.”
- “One of the core principles or advantages of Agile delivery models in particular is that you’re looking at delivering value for the client early on.”
- “We always make sure that anything that we do, if we’re going to do it once, it’s noted down for the client, it’s a repeatable process, we can use a junior resource to reiterate this over and over again, and we’ve also got the checks and balances in terms of quality that can really ensure that it stands up to standards and the quality that the client expects from us.”
- “We found that the [reusable AI models] pre-packaged on Reveal are actually very good. The ones I’ve mentioned around data cleaning [have been] a big win for us and then outside of that it’s really building out our own.”
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