eDiscovery Leaders Live: Tom Matarelli of Reveal
Tom Matarelli, Senior VP of Sale at Reveal, joins George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, for ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive.
Tom Matarelli has a long history in the legal tech, governance, risk, and compliance space. After starting as a CPA, Tom moved into forensic accounting and investigations at the Big 4 with a focus on data analytics. In 2009, Tom moved from forensic accounting to forensic technology, specializing in eDiscovery and related services. He helped build an eDiscovery practice at a leading global advisory, creating a delivery platform. In 2013, he moved to the software side, joining Relativity to build and lead the global advisory practice, helping their largest partners take their legacy solutions and services to the global market. Tom now leads sales at Reveal, helping law firms, partners and corporations adopt modern AI based workflows for eDiscovery, Investigations, audit, and corporate compliance.
Tom grounded his discussion in his background conducting forensic accounting investigations. He compared how these investigations used to be performed with what now can be done with the benefit of modern eDiscovery and investigative tools. Tom talked about the advances that corporations, law firms, and legal service providers all have been making – and how improvements on the platform side have facilitated these advances.
Key Highlights
- [1:19] Tom’s background.
- [3:00] A shift in the market: Looking back at forensic accounting in earlier days.
- [4:06] Forensic accounting explained.
- [5:47] The “looking at people” part of forensic accounting.
- [6:59] What a forensic interview looks like.
- [7:57] What modern eDiscovery tools bring to accounting investigations.
- [9:31] Better ways to find patterns of communication behavior.
- [11:27] Bringing capabilities in-house, making them mainstream, and beginning to use them outside of eDiscovery.
- [15:24] eDiscovery tools used toward compliance ends.
- [16:23] Then and now in forensic investigations: Doing in days what took months.
- [18:13] Using Reveal’s tools to clear corporate internal audit backlogs.
- [19:33] The shift from using cobbled-together platforms to packaged, focused risk-testing algorithms.
- [21:21] The value of getting to know the end-user of our eDiscovery platform.
- [22:22] Major advances by corporations, law firms, and LSPs.
- [23:15] Corporations starting to say, here’s what we need from you – and starting to do more themselves.
- [23:58] What an active end-user role looks like and how that improves the platform.
- [25:44] How to get the end-user perspective.
- [27:39] Moving beyond keywords searches to better approaches.
Key Quotes by Tom Matarelli
- “The forensic accounting goes hand in hand with the computer forensics and more recently the eDiscovery. What I could do in weeks to try to recreate a financial scenario, do my interviews, figure out who, what, and when, [with] modern eDiscovery tools…I can tell that story in minutes, not days.”
- “Within half an hour of doing some automated analysis, I’m going to be able to paint the story pretty quickly. And that’s probably the biggest change I see, where these tools are becoming easier to use, they’re no longer in the hands of the highly trained computer forensic, SQL person, they are now in the hands of the investigator, the interviewer, the corporation as a business-as-usual process.”
- “[With modern tools, now] I can start to look at my firmwide risk – my global risk – rapidly, assess it effectively with data, and make decisions on how I want to handle these things. It’s a fundamental change.”
- “[At a lunch and learn in Austin last week], we had some younger attorneys who are incredibly sophisticated with data, with systems, with technology… You are seeing these law firms really do some amazing things.”
- “The LSPs are starting to differentiate themselves. Everyone was basically reselling a market-leading platform. Now you are seeing these firms really specialize with custom solutions.”