Parkash Khatri, CEO of Intrepid Managed Discovery, joins George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, for ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive.
Parkash founded Intrepid Managed Discovery in 2019, inspired by the impending birth of his first child. Intrepid is an homage to Parkash’s late father, who taught him that intrepid means fearless. Parkash’s background is in information technology auditing. Early is his career, he worked in the Care Fusion division of Cardinal Health, where he was responsible for establishing the in-house discovery division. He spent the next decade as a consultant, specializing in pharmaceutical litigation. With Intrepid, he has expanded into patent litigation more broadly, employment matters, DOJ investigations, and most recently deposition services.
After discussing his path from internal audit to eDiscovery provider CEO, Parkash offered a set of five lessons learned along the way: specialization, scalability, adaptability, growth and accountability, and predictability. Parkash described what he meant for each of these lessons. He then talked about them both as they apply to in-house legal department personnel and to service providers. Parkash closed with thoughts on where his company is headed next as well as what as benefits we might get from emerging technologies such as ChatGPT.
Key Highlights
- [1:26] Parkash’s background.
- [2:40] Why the move from internal audit to eDiscovery.
- [4:47] From an in-house eDiscovery role to eDiscovery consulting.
- [5:52] That path from his initial consulting work to Interpid.
- [8:21] Interpid – offering end-to-end discovery services.
- [8:51] Lesson learned #1: specialization.
- [10:20] Lesson learned #2: scalability.
- [12:21] Lesson learned #3: adaptability.
- [13:38] Lesson learned #4: growth and accountability.
- [14:18] Lesson learned #5: predictability.
- [14:56] Donning the in-house hat: how to apply these lessons if you are in a corporate legal department.
- [18:53] Where to find money, when in-house, for education, certifications, and the like.
- [21:35] Addressing scalability when you are in-house.
- [23:32] Adaptability and flexibility from an in-house perspective.
- [25:34] Where Intrepid is heading next.
- [26:10] Technology making our live easier – and the possibilities offered by tools such as ChatGPT.
Key Quotes
- Specialization: “It’s always a question of what we can do well. Anyone can do anything if you throw enough money at it, but that’s not the objective. The mindset from the internal standpoint that I always had was, find the most cost-effective way of doing something.”
- Scalability: “The key to specialization is scalability…. With two people and the amount of litigations we had, there was no way that we could stay up 24/7 even if we tried to and do all the work. That’s where the technology component came into play.”
- Adaptability: “No one day is the same and you have to be able to adapt…. As a service provider, that is a huge aspect of what we have to do. We have to be able to pivot and go to clients, to meet client needs where they need us to meet them.”
- Growth and accountability: “That comes from getting clients what they need. That comes from making sure if we do make a mistake, we take ownership of it. That goes to making sure that if there’s a need to change, that change is implemented and identified as quickly as possible and you learn and grow as quickly as possible, otherwise you’re going to become obsolete very quickly.”
- Predictability: “Predictability is key across the board, especially for clients. Clients want to know how much something is going to cost, when its going to come in, and what can we do to make sure that numbers aren’t blown out of proportion or the work product that comes out of it meets the standard that we have set.”
- “Nobody in a corporate setting fights the need to learn more so you can do your job better. If you can demonstrate that there is a need for you to understand, as an in-house person, things your vendors are going or they’re not doing because they are too afraid to even propose that to you, that can be a huge help in getting the budgetary restrictions removed.”
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