eDiscovery Leaders Live: Michael Amaral of HaystackID
Michael Amaral, Director Technology Innovation at HaystackID, joins George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, as part of a special ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive series broadcast from ILTACON 2022.
Michael Amaral is a technologist with over 25 years of experience helping companies solve complex data problems in compliance, governance, privacy, and litigation matters. Prior to joining HaystackID, Michaell was VP of Sales and Operations for GerogeJon, where he consulted with Fortune 500 companies and AmLaw 100 firms on process and infrastructure requirements for large scale data management deployments. Additionally, Michael spent 11 years as CTO and VP of technical operations for a large litigation support provider functioning as the lead technical resource on some of the largest litigation matters in the US.
Michael spent much of the session discussing the growing overlap and interconnectivity between eDiscovery, privacy, cyber security, and information governance. He talked about similarities between the different areas, how to use eDiscovery tools in those other areas and how to convince clients to let you do so, and how working across those four areas allows provider like Haystack – as well as clients – more effectively work in each area. And, of course, Michael talked about Haystack’s relaunch of its global advisory group, refocused along the same four lines.
Key Highlights
- [2:52] The surprising similarities between privacy, cyber, and governance – and eDiscovery.
- [4:20] How to put new spins on eDiscovery tools to use them for other opportunities.
- [5:34] Convincing clients to try new spins.
- [6:50] A new class of AI-based tools, including Reveal, that help you understand data better.
- [7:35] The need to look at how to integrate eDiscovery with solutions like Microsoft Purview.
- [7:56] The fundamental need to understand your data to better work with it.
- [8:53] The relaunch of Haystack’s global advisory group.
- [9:47] Mitigating cyber (and other) risks early.
- [12:41] Privacy and cyber combined as the first real information governance driver.
- [16:16] Enterprise offerings.
- [17:43] The value of privacy and cyber lessons learned to eDiscovery.
- [19:04] Current challenges working with data.
- [20:09] Understanding what rules you need to abide by – and how to do that.
- [24:40] Criteria to consider when selecting a provider.
- [26:12] Final thoughts.
Key Quotes
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- “Basically, [for eDiscovery, privacy, cyber, and governance] we do the same thing every time. We have to identify where the data is. We have to build an index of the data. We have to perform some analysis of that data. And we have to act on that data…. Really it’s all the same processes and the same tools with different spins on them can be used for a lot of these new opportunities.”
- ”You do need the whole new class of AI-based tools out there, which Reveal is known for,… that really help you understand the data better.”
- “Haystack recently announced the relaunch of its global advisory group with four real functional areas: privacy…, governance…, cyber and breach…, and the enterprise…. The goal is for us to be able to go out and consult with our clients on all of these matters.”