InsideCounsel Roundtable - May 2010 - 6

Roundtable
large organizations. I read in Ken Auletta’s “Googled” that Google has a culture built on indexing the world and saving everything. G-mail didn’t even have a delete button in its first iteration. Imagine those data volumes. Beaumont, Google: Why did I know someone was going to bring that up! Fishman, Hoffmann-La Roche: There are outside counsel who really understand e-discovery. They are willing to get in the trenches with you and roll up their sleeves and fight the fight. You have to select the appropriate counsel for your company’s needs. You need to find somebody who not only understands e-discovery, but is somebody who will sit down with you and learn your processes and data, work with your IT, legal folks and records managers. Communication between in-house and outside counsel is essential. Jay Brudz, GE: It’s very difficult to make the case to hire a lawyer or a firm based on the fact they are good at e-discovery. Companies generally hire the guy who’s best at an area of the law, because when you are hiring you don’t know if there is going to be a big discovery case or not. For the guy who is best at a certain thing, we are able to internally educate him. I see a lot of law firms building e-discovery practices, and I don’t know if that’s really the way to go. I think it will be a core competency that will be expected of every lawyer worth their salt, but I’m not yet convinced that it will be a huge market differentiator. Knaapen, Chevron: Chevron values process— we have a process for everything. We have included that process thinking in the law function and the way we manage our matters and set up our expectations for outside

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InsideCounsel Roundtable - May 2010

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