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    eDiscovery Leaders Live
    October 19th

    eDiscovery Leaders Live: Michael Hodgson of PwC

    George Socha
    George Socha

    eDiscovery Leaders Live: Michael Hodgson of PwC

     

    Michael Hodgson, Senior Manager, Digital & Forensic Investigations, at PwC, joins George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, for ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive.

    Mike is a Senior Manager in PwC's UK Forensic Services business, based out of the London office. He specializes in advising clients in the implementation and use of technology within legal, risk and compliance functions, and supporting organizations responding to crisis and fraud, from complex global investigatory and regulatory matters to data breaches and ransomware attacks. Mike’s key focus recently has been helping organizations respond positively from moments of crisis, taking the learnings from these events to make positive transformational change or to build out their own internal capability to deal with these in the future whether that's helping organizations procure and implement new technology, designing and building internal SOPs and playbooks, maximizing operational performance through process transformation, or carrying out data discovery and remediation projects.

    Mike focused on helping organizations respond to crises and effect positive transformational change.

    Key Highlights

      • [1:31] Introducing Mike.
      • [1:47] How Mike ended up in eDiscovery and at PwC.
      • [3:23] How Mike and his PwC team help clients respond to crises.
      • [3:58] Helping organizations prepare to respond better in the future.
      • [4:55] Drawing on learnings to deal with crises in an efficient and effective manner.
      • [6:00] Conversations with clients about learnings from when crises hit.
      • [6:31] Forward-looking, transformational efforts – how to remediate before having to respond.
      • [7:46] Reactive approaches still more common, proactive more challenging, but some change underfoot.
      • [9:33] What prompts organizations to seek to get ahead of the problem.
      • [11:09] Taking an educational approach to help organizations understand the impact.
      • [11:53] Common themes, patterns, and solutions.
      • [14:12] Financial services as an example: not having a good understanding of my data.
      • [15:01] What can be done long-term to minimize risk and cost.
      • [15:32] Ensuring you have the technology that can deal with your data.
      • [16:07] Similarities between preparing for transformation and dealing with eDiscovery.
      • [17:16] And differences.
      • [17:46] Applying use cases across all areas of the business and finding symmetries across areas.
      • [18:51] Key learnings for organizations going down the transformation journey.
      • [19:29] How they’ve used their own learnings to build their internal capabilities as well as those of clients.
      • [21:37] How long transformational engagements tend to last and how broad their scope tends to be.
      • [23:25] The range of organizations they help.
      • [24:32] What organizations should hope to get out of a transformation process.
      • [27:01] How clients can best evaluate the different organizations they could engage to assist them with transformation efforts.


    Key Quotes 

    • “A lot of my time is spent … [on] how do we make the most of the latest trends and technologies to innovate and automate a lot of what organizations do.”
    • “When crises hit organizations, many organizations … are not set up to be able to deal with those in an efficient and effective manner. Although you should never want or expect to have one of those hit, it’s good practice to make sure that you’re in the best position possible to respond should that ever be the case.”
    • “A lot of the conversations I’ve having with clients is around … what are the challenges when something like this hits: speed to mobilization, have I got organizations that can actually help me with this, do I understand where my data is, do I understand who my stakeholders are, and how can I take learnings from that and glean longer-term value.”
    • “Where organizations have gone through this and they had the unfortunate situation of having had to deal with this reactively, we use it as a great use case to educate other organizations so that they can understand what the potential impact might be.”
    • “One of the key learnings for organizations who are going down this transformation journey is think outside the box, engage your wider stakeholders, look at the broader use cases, because ultimately [if] you are bringing something in you want to make the greatest use out of it, get the greatest value.”

    Connect with Michael