Extract from Trudy Knockless’s article “‘Setting Standards of Excellence’: E-Discovery Teams Require Dedicated Leadership”
E-discovery has become ever-daunting for companies, as the number of electronic messages generated daily continues to soar. But the task is manageable if firms establish a culture of excellence and strong leadership.
“When I [got] to Facebook, one of the most important things I did early on was to figure out that we had a very small but incredible group of people doing e-discovery at the time,” said Paul Grewal, who was deputy general counsel of the social media company for four years before becoming chief legal officer of Coinbase in 2020.
“But we didn’t have senior leadership that was really focused on setting standards of excellence and really pushing the team to think bigger. So that was something I set to change relatively early.”
He added that he had a similar experience at Coinbase—having “incredible people” doing the work of e-discovery but no dedicated leader—a gap he recently filled by appointing a director of e-discovery services.
Grewal spoke at a recent e-discovery-leadership webinar organized by Zapproved, a maker of discovery software. Grewal and fellow panelist Ellen Blanchard, the director of discovery and information governance at T-Mobile, agreed that technology is developing faster than companies can build technology to preserve, collect or review data.
