Reinventing Professionals

I spoke with Derek Duarte, the president of BlackStone Discovery, which integrates e-discovery, consulting, forensics, case management, and technology development for law firms and corporate legal teams worldwide, with a focus on the West Coast of the U.S. and Asia. We discussed key trends in electronic discovery, where organizations are incorporating innovation into their discovery processes, how they can negotiate the scope of their discovery requests, how metadata impacts e-discovery strategy, and where e-discovery support is headed.

I spoke with Bill Hamilton, a legal skills professor at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law and the executive director of the UF Law E-Discovery Project, which is hosting the UF Law E-Discovery Conference on Thursday, March 29th. Bill practiced with Holland & Knight in Miami and Tampa for 27 years and at Quarles & Brady in Tampa for six, where he served as the firm’s national e-discovery partner. We discussed the UF Law E-Discovery Conference on Thursday, March 29th, the Careerfest component of the event, the consortium of professors meeting after the conference to discuss e-discovery education in law schools, and how individuals can remotely take advantage of the content (as the law school will be live streaming and recording the sessions).

I spoke with Michelle Desachy, the vibe manager for the Hard Rock Hotel in Riviera Maya, Mexico. We discussed her role at the facility, the importance of maintaining a unified culture, and the value of understanding client interests to constantly improve customer service.

I spoke with Joe Garber, the global head of product marketing for information management and governance at Micro Focus, a global software company that among many other tools, develops security and risk solutions, as well as predictive analytics. We discussed in the increased interest in predictive analytics, how professionals are approaching security and risk in 2018, the challenges associated with encouraging enterprises to adopt stronger information governance strategies, and what the rise of tools like those offered by Micro Focus indicate about the trajectory of the legal industry.

I spoke with Keith Lee, a lawyer, author, and blogger in Birmingham, Alabama. He has been blogging at Associates Mind for eight years and recently created LawyerSmack, a private community for attorneys interested in discussing practice-related issues with their peers in real time. We discussed the genesis of LawyerSmack, how it works, the community’s most active groups, what is driving its popularity, the surprising benefits of its creation, and what its growth indicates about the changing nature of communication in the legal profession.