eDiscovery Leaders Live: Michael Kriegal & Rajuan Pasha of TransPerfect
Michael Kriegal, Vice President, Consulting Services and Antitrust Practice Group at TransPerfect, and Rajuan Pasha, Director at TransPerfect, join George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, for ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive.
Rajuan is a Director in TransPerfect's London, Dubai and EU eDiscovery Project Management Teams. He is an eDiscovery specialist with over 10 years' experience of managing projects and providing consultancy services in litigations, arbitration, investigations, information governance, GDPR, TAR, and data analytics. Rajuan has worked for some of the largest eDiscovery vendors managing multi-jurisdictional and complex projects. He has hands-on experience of working on projects with bespoke and custom workflows, while providing support and advice to major law firm and corporate clients with managing their eDiscovery projects.
Michael Kriegal is a Vice President, Consulting Services and Antitrust Practice Group at TransPerfect Legal Solutions, where he leads the technical consulting team. This includes work related to TAR, analytics, onboarding of new technologies, application development, as well as creating solutions for the ever-expanding needs within the eDiscovery realm. Mike is always on the lookout for new data source types with a focus on solving clients’ needs for the review and production of non-standard data. Mike previously practiced law and subsequently gained valuable experience as an ESI analyst, project manager, and team lead of project managers.
Mike and Rajuan talked TAR adoption with me. They compared different levels of adoption in the UK – very high, at least for certain matters – with those in the US, Europe, and elsewhere. They discussed how adoption levels vary by type of matter, by degree of user experience and sophistication, and by the volume of documents in a matter. Rajuan and Mike also talked about various types of data analytics they use, the values those types offer, and some of the challenges posed by both those types of analytics and the types of data with which they are used. Finally, Mike and Rajuan turned to the impact of TAR and the level of TAR in merger control proceedings.
Key Highlights
- [4:00] TAR adoption in the UK.
- [5:06] What “TAR is now the norm” means on a percentage basis.
- [5:52] The disclosure project TAR requirement: its success and likely future.
- [7:02] TAR adoption in the US: a huge uptick.
- [8:38] Varying levels of TAR adoption.
- [10:52] Adoption levels in investigations.
- [12:20] Adoption levels for DSARs.
- [13:11] Adoption levels outside the UK, Europe, and the US.
- [14:04] Adoption in antitrust or merger control matters versus in remediation or other areas requiring fine precise definition.
- [15:10] Adoption levels as a function of user sophistication and experience.
- [15:52] Adoption levels by document counts.
- [16:32] Different types of data analytics, their uses and value: deduplication, communications analysis, clustering.
- [18:22] The utility of image and media analytics.
- [20:17] Multilingual capabilities and challenges.
- [24:42] The impact of TAR in merger control proceedings.
- [27:40] The level of TAR adoption in merger control proceedings.
Key Quotes
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- “In the UK with the introduction of the disclosure pilot … what we now are seeing is that [the use of TAR has] actually become the norm rather than the exception. Very few review teams now like the idea of reviewing everything and they’d rather go down that TAR route and be able to prioritize the review, cull the review, through the use of advanced analytics.” – Rajuan
- “CAL has exploded over the past, what has it been, five years. I would say for large projects, let’s over 100,000, I think we are probably at even 90%. I would say for smaller cases – under 100,000 – we are probably more around the 50-60% range.” – Mike
- “[In DSAR cases] entity extraction for example is a really powerful tool because you are trying to identify all the personal information. Brainspace … gives you all that. All the social security numbers, all the European personal data that you could find in documents – we are able to quickly extract those, put them into an auto-redaction workflow, and then speed that process along.” – Rajuan
- “I would say in antitrust, merger control, [TAR is] basically always used. I would say the cases that I see it used the least often are a lot of times when we are doing things like remediations where basically you have to have almost 100 percent precision – where you need to get every single document.” – Mike
- “Sometimes it just takes that first job to understand and realize the benefits [of TAR] and then once you get that it’s usually pretty easy to push it forward.” – Mike