eDiscovery Leaders Live: Linesh Maharaj of King & Wood Mallesons
Linesh Maharaj, a director in the Applied Legal Technology group at King & Wood Mallesons, joins George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, as part of a special ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive series broadcast from ILTACON 2022.
Linesh Maharaj is a Director within the Applied Legal Technology group at King & Wood Mallesons, based in Sydney, Australia. Linesh's main area of expertise is in the execution of large-scale document review projects for discovery, arbitrations, and regulatory requests. During his time at KWM, he established the firm's managed document review offering and the firm’s transaction support team – both key enablers in the firm's transformation strategy. In a previous role, Linesh ran the TAR process for the first court ordered predictive coding matter in Australia.
Linesh began the session by discussing his background and role at KWM, talked about not just their eDiscovery services but the technology services they offer on the transactional side, and discussed how those service circle back to and enhance their eDiscovery offerings. He talked about how they train new lawyers, and how those efforts yield fruit in the form of new use cases suggested by the new lawyers. Linesh discussed how their team has been growing and how it supports clients, then turned to issues surrounding data security. As one who worked on the first TAR case in Australia, Linesh shared his experience on the matter as well as the lessons learned from it – perhaps not least of which is KWM’s use of CAL or predictive coding on nearly every matter. Linesh then closed with thoughts on the impact of the pandemic on eDiscovery and practice support.
Key Highlights
- [1:31] Linesh’s background and role at KWM, both in litigation and investigations and on the transactional side.
- [3:03] The wide range of technology services they offer on the transactional side.
- [4:20] Looping back from the transactional side to the discovery side.
- [5:53] Engraining technology into new lawyers – who then come up with their own new use cases.
- [7:10] Their rapidly growing Applied Legal Technology team and its rapidly expanding capabilities.
- [9:12] Presenting technology and solutions to clients.
- [10:03] A diverse team bringing very different experiences and expertise.
- [11:25] Building viable pricing models.
- [12:21] The growing importance of data security.
- [13:49] Ensuring data security.
- [15:08] A growing security-based need to keep data on prem.
- [16:40] Lessons learned from working on the first TAR case in Australia – a most unusual matter.
- [23:07] The frequency of use of TAR in Australia today.
- [23:47] The impact of the pandemic on eDiscovery and practice support.
Key Quotes
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- “One of the things we do as a firm is to try and engrain the technology through our graduates. We want to get them early. As part of their induction and their first year of practice we take them through these technology boot camps.”
- “One of the great things at KWM is that culture of trying something new and something different.”
- “If you’ve got a champion in the organization who is across the product as well as across the business and can sit between the lawyer and the technology, that fosters that growth and almost puts that comfort blanket around the lawyers. It also gives the lawyers more comfort in presenting to clients when you have somebody who has a hand on the technology.”
- “The clients couldn’t care less ultimately about the product, but they’re really intrigued about the solution and that solution is people and technology, it’s not just one or the other.”
- “I can only speak to our practice [when it comes to how commonly TAR is used] but it’s part of our day-to-day practice, whether it’s to undertake a review from start to finish, whether it is just to do a form of QC on stuff that’s already reviewed, or if its just used to identify very specific documents related to a specific issue. We try to use some form of CAL or predictive coding to enhance any review that we do.”