eDiscovery Leaders: Manfred Gabriel of Holland & Knight

Each week on ACEDSBlogLive, I chat with an eDiscovery leader. For the Oct. 9 session, I sat down with Manfred Gabriel. Manfred is Senior Counsel at Holland & Knight, where he leads that firm’s Legal Support Services organization. We talked about eDiscovery past and present; about the new eDiscovery capabilities Manfred has been rolling out at Holland & Knight; and about the future of eDiscovery, particularly how through effective use of AI it can reconnect attorneys to their cases, how it can help counsel find what matters most, and how lawyers can use it to build their cases.

Recorded live on October 9, 2020 | Transcription below

George Socha:
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Welcome to #ACEDSBlogLive, I am George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal. Each Friday morning at 11:00 EST, I host an episode of #ACEDSBlogLive, where I get a chance to chat with luminaries in eDiscovery and related areas. Before I introduce this week’s guest, I just want to point out that we have a comments section on the panel here, so for those of you who are joining live instead of watching the recording of this, you can go ahead, type in your thoughts, your comments and we will try to include what we see there in the discussion we have today.

I am very pleased to have joining us as our guest today, my good friend Manfred Gabriel. Manfred is Senior Counsel at Holland & Knight. He leads that firm’s Legal Support Services organization, where he oversees Holland & Knight’s comprehensive and integrated eDiscovery and fact-finding unit. And if it sounds impressive, it’s because it is impressive.

They have leveraged advanced technologies and workflows to assist clients in managing the risks and costs of eDiscovery; something that is of course a challenge for all of us. They’ve got a wide range of eDiscovery capabilities so that they’re able to deliver what’s needed up to and including on large and complex projects, but they go beyond that, working on contract review and analysis, process automation, and a host of other areas. Manfred also teaches an eDiscovery course at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law in New York, where I was privileged enough a week or two ago to be Manfred’s guest in front of his class. And Manfred, by the way, I thought you did a great job with the part of the class before I got involved. Once I was there, well, we do what we can, but I thought it was a very fine class and I certainly would have appreciated being a student in it.

And all of this at Holland & Knight just since July of 2019 – so Manfred has been there just over a year, a year and two months, three months? Something like that now. He has a J.D. from Columbia University School of Law and has passed the First and Second State Exams, which are the German equivalent of J.D. and bar admission, if I understand correctly – at – and I hope I don’t get the name too badly – Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich.

Manfred Gabriel:
Very nice job.

George Socha:
There we go. Before his current position, Manfred was a Principal at KPMG and Senior Managing Director at FTI, so he knows and understands the vendor world well, an Associate at Latham & Watkins, a Law Clerk for the District of Connecticut and an Associate, as well, at O’Melveny & Myers. His stint at Holland & Knight is not his first rodeo in a law firm either.

So Manfred, welcome to this week’s session and I’d like to hear from you what you’ve been up to? Where you’re going? I know there are certain things you’ll only allude to, as I would expect, and I especially would like to hear as we go forward your thoughts about where eDiscovery is moving and where it ought to be moving. So with that, let’s turn to you.

Manfred Gabriel:
Well George, thank you first of all for that wonderful introduction. I’m impressed with myself, I didn’t you know… so, thanks. It’s great to be here, I think it’s a wonderful thing that you are doing this and let me take this opportunity to also congratulate you on your recent move to join Reveal and thank you for coming and speaking to my class.

It’s been a tremendous honor and privilege to be at Holland and Knight, which is a terrific firm in the states and very innovative in their approach. And I was glad to join that team because my remit from day one was to build something that hadn’t really been attempted in the law firm space, to create basically a full-service organization, including traditional eDiscovery processing and hosting, but also document review and related sort of labor tasks and innovation-related approaches within a law firm, to specifically serve that law firm more efficiently.

And the thinking behind that is that what we’re trying to do is to enable litigators to return to their real calling as litigators with full command of the entire process. That world that we’ve been living in has for the last 20 to 30 years has been one in which we’ve relied on a high degree of specialization outside the law firms in the vendor space, specifically and the provider space to manage the technical challenges and the labor challenges of the exploding data volumes that we deal with both in eDiscovery, but also in related areas. For example, contract review and contract abstraction tasks, things like that.

So, at the same time we’ve seen a growth of LPOs – Legal Process Outsourcing Organizations – both domestically and abroad that showed a way forward, where we could take many tasks that traditionally had been handled within the law firm and handle them at a higher quality, more efficiently with a specialized team and sort of modern approaches to project management, process management, process improvement, things that law firms are coming around to embracing but haven’t been traditionally part of the way that lawyers think about their own work within the law firm.

Rolling Out New eDiscovery Capabilities at Holland & Knight

George Socha:
So, first of all, yours is not the first firm to attempt to, I’ll put it simply, bring eDiscovery in house. It sounds as if you’re trying to do some things you think others haven’t tried or been so successful at. Can you give me some idea as to what those things look like?

Manfred Gabriel:
Yeah, I’m happy to do that and there are some differences here in the approach that we’ve chosen. Where running this within Holland & Knight, we consider it a core function of the law firm, a core service to provide to our clients that we want to have the degree of control and oversight and involvement in that we do with all our legal work. So, while there are several firms who have brought eDiscovery in-house as you’ve said, when you look closely many of those law firms have actually spun out eDiscovery services and related services into subsidiaries, which has benefits but also has some drawbacks.

So, we’ve made the conscious choice to keep these functions within the law firm and to put them under a broader innovation remit, where we’re working together. We have an innovation team within Holland & Knight as well that we’re working very closely together with, so that eDiscovery is just the most urgent and most well-understood problem of dealing with large amounts of unstructured data. It’s not the only problem that we have in the legal profession around unstructured data and absorbing it in a meaningful way and deriving value from it. And it allows us to combine with the other processes, the other practice groups within the law firm in a meaningful way. So that has sort of been a difference and it’s been a very exciting road in that respect.

We’ve made some significant strides in terms of our innovation, in terms of both coming up with an appropriate labor model where we can use appropriate level resources for the right tasks. And that’s a benefit to us and it’s a benefit to the clients who understand the value that we’re creating and are ready to pay us appropriately, because we drive toward efficiency, both in the labor model and in the technology that we’re using with innovation and automation. So, one of the big achievements that we have, and I’d like to call out my team here, particularly Joan Washburn who has taken leadership for this inside Holland and Knight. We’ve recently moved our eDiscovery platform software into the cloud and we are now fully within the AWS Amazon Web Services, which provides both cost savings in terms of the storage cost, but more importantly provides us with a platform that allows us to automate tasks, allows us to do a number of things that were very difficult to do in sort of the traditional hosted environment.

George Socha:
You of course had choices when you went to move to a cloud environment. You could have gone with Azure, of course. You went with AWS; there are other options out there. Why AWS?

Manfred Gabriel:
So, I think there… that was a long process for us to take a look at and evaluate, whether we wanted a tool-based cloud, whether we wanted a general service cloud. Which one, Azure or AWS, which we would choose? In the end, we felt that the firm generally was moving in an AWS direction and it was important for us to be sort of the spearhead within the firm because clearly we handle the largest data volumes and we have the most sort of professional expertise for handling these data volumes within the firm. But there are other functions in the firm that we’re currently developing and that are already existing to leverage some of the automation and compute functions within AWS, specifically. I’m not saying that we couldn’t have built it in another platform, but that’s the one that made sense for us at this time.

George Socha:
It sounds from what you’re saying, as if your team has good solid working relations with the IT team within the law firm; something I know isn’t always the case. Am I interpreting that correctly?

Manfred Gabriel:
Yes, we do actually, and that’s been a great boon. So some years ago the eDiscovery function was actually within Holland & Knight, part of the IT department, and then the decision was made before my arrival actually, but my arrival was part of the strategy that was begun with. The eDiscovery services group was moved into the litigation department and it functions as a practice group within the litigation group and that has significant implications about how the work that we’re doing within our group is regarded. It’s not just an IT function, but it is a meaningful legal function that contributes to the success of the clients in a very direct way. But we’re lucky enough to have a wonderful IT department that we work very, very, closely with and actually that was instrumental for us to make the transition to the cloud recently and that permitted us also to put in place security features and security functions that are harder to achieve in other platforms. And we feel confident that in terms of data security, cybersecurity, especially for our client data, we were probably at the bleeding edge of what’s possible in the law firm today.

George Socha:
One of the challenges really over the decades when it comes to eDiscovery in law firms is engagement, getting the attorneys working on matters actually to make effective use of the capabilities that folks are trying to deliver to them. It sounds again, from what you’re saying as if getting successful and widespread engagement is very much part of your remit.

Manfred Gabriel:
It is and it is an earned relationship with the partners and the practice groups. So, our approach within the group and I have a wonderful team that I work with, is that we are within the law firm, we sit down the hall from the attorneys that we work for, but there isn’t an outside provider out there who is better at what we do and we really hold us to a very high standard of quality, there is a continual process of improvement.

We run our own beta tests and everything and we started within the group, but now especially for complex litigation tasks like multidistrict litigation and everything, we’ve been rolling out this project management tool to the case teams who really appreciate having a tool that implements the best practices around process management, without generating a lot of overhead for them, without requiring them to log in to an outside tool and without requiring them to speak another language or learn something that is alien to the way that they approach work. We work with them, we ask them, “Well how do you manage this work?”, and then we translate that into our tool. We’re very nimble and adopting it to the different needs of the case teams.

George Socha:
Sounds very impressive. Let’s look a little more broadly beyond the constraints of the amazing things you’re already working on at Holland & Knight, to where you think as I foreshadowed earlier, where do you think the eDiscovery industry is moving and where it should be moving?

The Future of eDiscovery, Reconnecting Attorneys to Their Cases with AI

Manfred Gabriel:
Okay, let’s start with where it is moving. So, I think the experience of the last 10 years where we seriously started using some more advanced technologies. Before 2010/2012, eDiscovery technology was really trying to replicate in an electronic format, what we had been doing in a conference room table with red welds and bankers boxes and folders in a manual way. So, the first approach was like, let’s just translate that and so you go into an electronic tool and it has a folder structure, it has something called a folder or an assignment and things like that…

George Socha:
That was the original DOS version of Summation, exactly that.

Manfred Gabriel:
Right. So, but then starting 10, 12 years ago we started thinking about machine learning and artificial intelligence, although we didn’t quite use that term yet, to take some of the work and make it more efficient. But the interesting thing is that really, the progress and the tools could not keep up with the explosion of the data volumes, so even though we were paddling faster and faster in terms of innovating in the space, the stream that we’re trying to swim against seemed to be getting stronger and stronger. And that’s simply because of the overwhelming amount of data that we now routinely deal with. But I think that we are at a point now where we can see that this is about to change and where the tools are going to be sufficiently powerful that we can absorb large amounts of information in a productive way and that we can envision…. and this is the world that we’re working toward within Holland & Knight, that we can envision a world where the attorneys feel again, completely connected to their case, to the information in their cases, where we have the tools and the workflows in place, enabling the litigators themselves to connect with the fact development, rather than outsourcing a significant part of their cases – the discovery part – to somebody else.

And then sort of in a second phase, thinking about deposition preparation, trial preparation, fact development and everything, which for the last years in the American legal field, has been almost regarded as a separate endeavor from what we typically call eDiscovery, which is getting through huge piles of electronically stored information and creating a production to the other side.

Finding What Matters Most

George Socha:
So, where should it be? What should it look like?

Manfred Gabriel:
Well, I think that’s what it should look like, all right. But I think there are still some areas that we need to clarify in the industry to get there. And I think we still have a very mushy conception of eDiscovery, specifically, where we’re not rigorous about defining what are the different aspects of the work that we’re doing and what are the appropriate workflows and tools that we’re using, the particular the computer-based tools, machine learning tools, conflict clustering tools and so forth…. text analytics tools or automation tools.

And I think if we could get to the point where we understand the difference for example between the dispositions of, what I call the disposition of documents. That is the most streamlined approach to determine whether a document is responsive to a production request under Rule 34A or equivalent state rules and needs to be turned over. Versus an information protection task. What are the most efficient tools to identify protected information within large document sets and identify them so that they can be redacted or can be isolated? Whether it’s PII or PHI (Personally Identifiable Information or Protected Health Information), whether it’s legal privilege, whether it’s attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine that we’re talking about. So that’s in my mind a separate task from the disposition of the documents and getting to that production set as quickly as possible.

Building the Case

And the third task that I’m frankly most excited about, is what I call “the construction of knowledge” or you could call it “fact development”, which is starting with a million, 2 million, 10 million documents that you get from the client and arriving at a set of documents that is small enough that you can use it in a case for depositions and for trial entered into evidence for the jury, but that represents the story that counsel wants to tell. So, that we’re working from the vast amount of data, to meaningful information, to actual knowledge that we can leverage, that the attorneys can leverage. And I think returning to the “Where should we be?”, I want to be in a place where we automate the routine tasks to the greatest extent possible, where we get to a point where we have some validation procedures for the work that we’re doing and where we give the attorneys working on the case the most direct access to the meaningful knowledge and the documents that showed this knowledge within the case.

George Socha:
Well, it’s a laudable set of ambitions. I think from what you said, you’re well on the path toward getting there. A long way to go of course, for all of us, but I think you are way ahead of many with that. Any final thoughts to share with the audience before we sign off?

Manfred Gabriel:

George Socha:
Manfred, thank you very much. Manfred Gabriel, for any of you who missed the introduction; is Senior Counsel at Holland & Knight, where he, to put it succinctly, heads up all their eDiscovery activities and so much more. Thanks for joining us, Manfred.

Manfred Gabriel:
Thank you George. I think it’s wonderful that you’re doing this and thanks for including me.