Before we begin, can you please give us an overview of the ALT eDiscovery team?

We’ve had a team specifically for eDiscovery for a long time now and since the Freehills merger with Herbert Smith five years ago we have grown our teams further and expanded our global footprint.

My key responsibility is to lead the eDiscovery team for Australia and Asia and develop our eDiscovery offerings across our practice group. We have large teams dedicated to document review and information-intensive work but we always leverage technology to provide tailored and cost efficient legal solutions for clients.

We use analytics in almost all of the cases we support and apply other techniques to reduce document volumes before we start on linear review with our review teams. That’s one of the strengths of the team; ALT eDiscovery team members who know how to drive the technology work together with frontline instructing teams to find ways to sift through a document set to identify the most relevant documents as efficiently as possible.

Operating as the sixth practice group of our global firm, our focus is to boost our technology offering and become a truly global eDiscovery team.

What are some of the challenges you face in operating an eDiscovery group. Over the next 12 months, how will volumes continue to grow?

Our continuing success has been driven by having the best people and culture. The unexpected nature of disputes and regulatory matters and planning around those needs is one of the biggest challenge our eDiscovery teams faces.

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Having a skilled, agile and collaborative team is critical in managing the demands that accompany these types of matters. At any given point in time we manage up to 40 active matters per month. As an integrated team within HSF, most disputes matters flow through to us for support on all eDiscovery aspects and, in most cases, also have a need for document review.

Keeping up with constant changes in technology is an ongoing challenge and opportunity. We need to find what new technology works for us and for our clients. Over the next 12 months the Australian market is shaping up to be busy. We expect the trend of increasing document volumes and variety of document sources to continue.

We also expect the outcomes of the banking, superannuation and financial services royal commission to generate additional work.

You work across a lot of different teams and that will grow over the next 12 months. How do you effectively make sure that you’re managing expectations well?

Our disputes matters are document intensive, meaning that’s where most of our work is generated.

We are proactively exploring new technologies that could further enhance our services and capabilities, and we are expanding our support within the corporate sector and in other practice areas on non-contentious matters.

We are also actively promoting our services, success stories and running presentations about the new technology capabilities of our group within the firm. We are running workshops internally to educate our teams on new ways of filtering documents for document review using the analytics capabilities of the review platform, especially within the disputes teams as they continue to see large document volumes and reduced time frames for production.

Particularly in the Australian market, there is a keen interest in adopting active learning/predictive coding and we are running workshops to ensure our lawyers are up to speed with that technology. Our goal is always to find the most efficient solutions for our clients, from both a time and cost perspective.

Internal awareness of how we work and what our capabilities are is key to managing expectations.

Having a solid, committed team ultimately helps us deliver on that goal. We are hoping to invest in our people and grow our teams globally to meet the increasing demands and to provide further enhanced services for our clients.

What would you describe as being your key point of difference?

The ALT team we have at the moment is like a family, and that really underpins our success.

We’ve just come out of an incredibly busy period, with the royal commission work representing just one matter out of more than 250 that we have supported over the past 12 months. Our team works incredibly well under pressure and despite the pressure of the past 12 months, we have come out on top by delivering high-quality work products and a retaining a highly engaged team.

We understand our client needs, as well as our instructing team needs. The strength of our team is mainly driven by internal collaboration as well as external collaboration with our clients.

Having a global team, our own review teams and technology teams who work in harmony is another key differentiator in my view. We are all working towards the same goal, retain the knowledge of the matter internally and deliver an end-to-end services all managed by ALT in close collaboration with the frontline HSF teams.

Going forward, what are some of the trends that you think are going to require your attention over the next couple of years?

Our focus is to improve on our eDiscovery service delivery model by becoming a truly global team.

We already have a large team in Australia, and our goal now is to build larger and more capable teams in the firm’s other offices around the world.

Technology plays a major part in our future plans, and we are always looking to expand our technology platform and capabilities. If we can’t achieve that aim, we can’t deliver and leverage our teams globally. We have seen our clients becoming more technologically savvy and we are focused on not only keeping pace, but leading by example.

With new technology and global teams, new opportunities and services will become possible. That will become another focus area for ALT’s management team to expand and develop over the next couple of years.

2019 is certainly shaping up to be a year of growth, opportunity and learning for ALT.