eDiscovery Leaders: Kristin Sunderman of Freddie Mac
Each week on eDiscovery Leaders Live, I chat with a leader in eDiscovery or related areas. Our guest on December 11 was Kristin Sunderman, Litigation Support Director, Legal Division at Freddie Mac.
Kristin and I had a wide-ranging discussion. We started with the impact of COVID on eDiscovery, a topic we have not addressed on this program before. Kristin talked about the growth of remote collection and remove review, once viewed skeptically but now being embraced. She also discussed the growing understanding, driven in part by the changes wrought by COVID, of the value the cloud and AI bring to eDiscovery. Switching directions, Kristen gave us the benefit of her experiences returning to the in-house side – how she gets to see a better picture and form stronger partnerships with vendors. Finally, Kirstin told us what she would like out of her ideal eDiscovery platform. It should do everything we want out of any eDiscovery platform, ride on the data no matter where it resides, never increase the overall data footprint, and most definitely give her a foot massage. Don’t we all want that?
Recorded live on January 8, 2021 | Transcription below
Note: This content has been edited and condensed for clarity.
George Socha:
Welcome to eDiscovery Leaders Live, hosted by ACEDS, and sponsored by Reveal. I am George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal. Each Friday morning at 11 am Eastern, I host an episode of eDiscovery Leaders Live where I get a chance to chat with eDiscovery luminaries.
Past episodes are available on the Reveal website, go to revealdata.com, select “Resources” and then select “eDiscovery Leaders Live Cast”.
Today, I am pleased to welcome as our guest, Kristin Sunderman. Kristin is the Litigation Support Director, Legal Division at Freddie Mac, and comes with years of experience on the corporate, on the provider, and on the law firm side. Kristin started out five years in law firms, in secretarial and paralegal roles, moved on to the corporate side working first at Merck and then at Teva Pharmaceuticals, and then spent 10 years on the provider side, working primarily at eTERA, moving up through the ranks from project manager to Managing Director, Operations, briefly at Haystack through the acquisition of eTERA, and then at WES Litigation Group. Just this last year, Kristin joined Freddie Mac and we are pleased to have her with us here today.
Kristin Sunderman:
Hi George, good morning. How are you?
George Socha:
Good morning. Glad you could join us.
Kristin Sunderman:
Thank you for having me.
The Impact of COVID on eDiscovery
George Socha:
We’ve got several things we want to cover. One topic I would like to turn to – we chatted about this a little before – is one that we have not touched in any of the previous episodes, I think we’ve done 13 episodes now. That is COVID and how COVID has been impacting eDiscovery and what machine learning adds for that, where it all fits for you, that whole big world? Now that I’ve given you that wide range of questions, where would you like to go with it?
Kristin Sunderman:
Well, how have you not talked about COVID? I’m impressed that I get to be the first one to talk about it and we’re about to enter into the second year of it, almost. There’s a lot, I think, to unpack with COVID. COVID has impacted our lives in many, many ways. I think that’s part of the issue with a pandemic, is it’s much more far reaching than just work or personal. It’s pretty much impacted everything that we’re doing.
If you think about when it started off, everything came to a screeching halt, courts were closed, and everything stopped. When I first went into the office that Friday, just to get the lay of the land, it was a ghost town. There were empty cups, because people literally just up and left in the middle of COVID.
Trying to pick up the pieces after that, I think there’s going to be some challenges. We all came in-house; I’m sitting in my home now. And once you did that transition, everything was chaotic because we were not only remote workers, we are IT specialists, we are homeschoolers, and we’re everything under the sun at once.
I think that we’re going to see moving forward that as a result of that chaos, people maybe weren’t as disciplined or maybe didn’t even know how to handle data or communications or preservation. There’s that big meeting you had, a status conference where your computer wasn’t working so you went to your kid’s computer or you went to the iPad or something to try to get your materials available. And who can blame you, with all of the chaos, we just have all been trying to survive. But I think the implications of collections are going to be impactful, data preservation and data governance even, because there’s going to be this period of time that’s somewhat of a black hole in a lot of ways with things being all over the place.
And we don’t have an end in sight. We’re now in the phase of adapting to what will that look like? How is eDiscovery going to be impacted? How do we keep going? Because as much as things halted, we still have to move forward. We still have a job to do; the legal field is considered an essential industry. So how do we continue on?
Remote Collection: At First Necessary, Now Desirable
I think there’s going to be a big reliance and continued reliance on remote collections. Collecting has always been a combination. You do remote when you can, but for the most part, you’ll have a team depending on the size in-house for three or four days doing collections on site. And with all of the restrictions and social distancing, that’s less and less ideal.
I think there’s a big window for this remote collection to be expanded and for more robust tools, more expansive tools. That’s going to be a really sweet spot for vendors to try to get into because there’s a big need. And I don’t see that changing because once you can find a way to collect remotely, is anyone really going to want to go back to being in-house and sending these teams all over the country and that grind of on the road five days a week. For forensic specialists, it’s challenging and it’s difficult, so why not continue down this path? Right? I mean, look at all the corporations that are even going towards keeping their workers remote because of the cost savings and the flexibility.
I’m anxious to get back to the office, but I’m somewhat an anomaly, I think, in that regard. So, I think that collection’s a big piece that’s going to impact it.
Working Remotely Has Tapped the Brakes
I also think the industry as a whole has slowed down a little bit. We haven’t had the ability to get data to the vendors, or we haven’t been able to collect as quickly, or we haven’t been able to even process as quickly. Everyone’s in this new world where you’re either trying to process from home for the first time, or you’re trying to coordinate couriers and collecting data and somebody to plug in the drive. There’re so many different variables that now take a lot more time or thought or creative solutions to get done that weren’t an issue when we were all in the office.
And as that’s happening, I think we’re also going to look at, if we can slow down a little bit for this, then what does that mean for the overall picture? Do we really need to be pushing things out in the same way that we were, or, especially for people like me who are in-house, can we keep some of that in-house now? Is there really even the need to do that?
Face-to-Face Not As Important As Before
The approach across the board will start to shift because we’re now looking at the world very differently than we did before. The world is much bigger and there’s just not that face-to-face need, it isn’t as essential anymore. We’re seeing that even here. Normally I’d be in the office with you, talking to you and drinking coffee or whatever the case may be. But here we are, I’m on my couch and don’t make me stand up, I don’t want to show you my sweats.
Remote Review – Now A No-Brainer
It’s a different life right now and I expect that post COVID, a lot of that’s going to carry over because there are some real benefits to it. We’ve had it going on long enough to where we’re now finding solutions to the challenges. We’re finding solutions to being at home and the connection issues, and the IT issues, and people are determining how to remote into computers and into the office so that they don’t have to be in there. They’re doing these remote collections, doing remote reviews. Across the board, remote review is started to take off before the pandemic. And now, it’s a no brainer. I mean, that’s where you want to be. Right? And the people are starting to dip their toe into it now are at a disadvantage to those vendors that were already doing it before, because they were already ahead of the game with the security and they were already looking at those things.
I’ll be the first to admit, when I heard about remote review… no way, there’s so many security issues, you don’t know who’s going to see it, the clean desk policies, all of these things that are much easier to control when you have everyone in one room. But we’re finding ways around it. We’re finding ways to make it defensible. We’re finding ways to work with it. And I think that that will continue on because we’re also driving the price down. Everything is now going to be so much more competitive and you can make much more money as a managed review service doing remote review because your pool’s much bigger and you have your accessibility. As that shift is happening, I think it’s going to really turn the vendors on their side and looking at new ways to service in-house and law firms, because our approach is just very different with the world in the way that it is right now.
The Cloud and AI: New Power to In-House Personnel and New Partnerships with Providers
George Socha:
So, two big areas of change of course, are the collection side. None of us are hopping on airplanes anymore and trying to carry hard drives through customs, if that’s even a viable option. Similarly, the review centers are for the time being closed down and we’re learning to handle things remotely. What sort of impact are you seeing when it comes to where systems are deployed on premise, in the cloud, via mobile solutions, things like that?
Kristin Sunderman:
Certainly for me personally, I spent much of my career doing on-prem – hardware, the brick and mortar type business. Although we had remote workers, data centers were steel and massive. There’s been a big push to go over to more of the web-based applications for many reasons. Now with the pandemic, it just makes so much more sense, because you are giving over some control of the back end but you’re getting so much more. You have all the securities in place. It’s a no brainer, it’s secure. There’s no question I think about that. That’s been proved and it’s defensible that it’s a secure practice. You have much more control over whether you can scale up or scale down. You’re no longer dependent on a company that has this massive infrastructure to be able to provide more space or to provide bigger workspaces. Especially being in-house, we can start to bring all of that stuff in. We can go to the web-based tools. We don’t have to worry about jump servers or remote access or VPN. We can go directly to where we need to go, expand up if we need to, bring it down.
I think that the cloud-based piece alone has been a huge game changer for in-house people like myself because we now have access to those same tools that we maybe wouldn’t have had before. That allows us to do more of the work inside of the corporations. In turn, people like me, who’ve been in the industry for a very long time, are starting to go in-house and we’re getting a lot more skilled and experienced with real-life experience eDiscovery. I won’t say this is a new field, it continues to evolve, when the “e” got in front of the “Discovery” everything’s changed a little bit. I think that as that continues to happen, we have this new age of people going in-house that are highly skilled and have done this work.
So managing cases doesn’t seem like an alarming task or something that is beyond our possibilities. And with these cloud-based solutions that can scale up and down, and now all the machine learning and the artificial intelligence, it now allows us to use our smaller in-house groups to do a lot more work. It’s amazing the stuff that we can do with almost a skeleton crew of eDiscovery specialists who are skilled and knowledgeable in these tools. But then we have so much coming to help us, assist us, to get us to where we need, it automatically changes it.
Over the past few years, there’s been this push to bring more in-house, but there were always limitations. I heard everything from, you know, five gigabytes, even up to like 500, just depending on the tools you have in-house as to what you can handle and then at that point, you cap it and it has to go to a vendor. I think cloud-based solutions and all of the AI and machine learning that’s becoming available to us, is going to change that because we can now really analyze, cull, go through massive amounts of data with the help of technology. This technology is now being made available to us in a very tangible way. For a corporation like Freddie to bring in an on-prem software solution that can handle up to 10 terabytes of data, is an overhaul. It’s a huge undertaking. But now we can go over and we can sign up with one of the cloud-based vendors and we’ll have that much and more at any given time if we need to, all while keeping all of our cybersecurity issues at bay. It’s a win-win in a lot of ways, and we’ll certainly start to shift, the industry as a whole, because vendors have been seen as the ones who… you know, in-house really handles the small matters and aren’t too impactful and we send anything of significance out.
I think that that’s really going to start to shift and you’ll see much more of a partnership between vendors and in-house eDiscovery centers, both at firms and corporations, where they’ll have to work together on not only approach, but strategy and manpower and much less of the just deferring to vendors as the experts in the field, because of the diversity and because of the fact that COVID has not only caused us all to reevaluate how and where we spend our time. It’s also having corporations look at the same thing. Across the board, everything’s getting re-evaluated as what makes more sense.
The technology is blowing everything out of the water. As you are aware, I saw recently there’s analytics right now in the coding panels. When you go through on a review, you can literally see right there, comparables and it’ll start to rate it and scale it. It’s changing the face of review into a much more tangible way, making things exciting for me. As somebody who’s gone in-house, I think that the possibilities are open and it’s really cool to see how it’s shifting. But that’s this industry, this industry doesn’t really stay the same.
George Socha:
I would be remiss if I didn’t say that you’re talking about the Reveal coding panel.
Kristin Sunderman:
I am talking about the Reveal coding.
Returning from Provider to In-House
George Socha:
You are one of those people who has made that move from the provider side to in-house. And you were in-house provider and in-house again. What’s it been like to return from the vendor’s side to the in-house role?
Kristin Sunderman:
It’s very different. It’s very different. It’s exciting, I think just because of all of these changes that are happening and because I do feel like there’s more of us that are going in-house, so this is becoming a different type of arena. It’s exciting for me because I think that in-house is becoming much more reputable and much more of a decision maker. I think we were a small subset of the industry historically, but I think that’s shifting now and that there’s going to be a lot more of thought leadership and helping to shape the way the industry goes from people like me that have come in-house, because we’re seeing the needs up close and personal.
A Bigger Picture and A Better Partnership
On the vendor side, you see everything on a matter-by-matter basis, and that’s how you handle it. Being in-house, I’m looking at, not matter by matter, I’m looking at department by department. I’m looking at data preservation, I’m looking at data classification, things that all go into my ability to collect and do eDiscovery, but on a much bigger scale. If you can start to tie all of that in together, I think that the approach is a little bit more expansive and you’ll start to see a lot of this emerging technology to help support it. We already are, as we have discussed with the automated processes and artificial intelligence and machine learning. It’s changing the way we even look at data, it’s changing how we deal with data.
Long gone are the days of where you just have one approach, where you’re just sitting and looking through boxes and boxes of documents. You now have options. You can do a straight review, you can do analytics, and you can do anything you want under the sun: grouping, coding, conceptual, whatever it is. It seems to be the time that you can make a wish and your data can somehow… one of these tools will find a way to bring the information out. You just have to find the right tool.
I think that’s where you’ll continue to see the partnership between the vendors and in-house counsel, because there’s an argument to be said for bringing work in-house but there’s also an argument for sending it out because you do have a limited number of resources in-house. You will have your tools that you use that will be phenomenal, that will get you to where you want to go. But there’s always going to be those cases that need some diversity of technology or diversity of thought or need to have a little bit of a different approach. That’s when that thought process will come and that partnership between in-house and vendors will really start to grow and flourish as you come up with these more complex approaches. That’s exciting because this industry changes so rapidly. To have the diversity of thought usually brings about some pretty fantastic results.
Where Venders Fit
George Socha:
As you were talking earlier in this discussion, I was thinking you might be making some of the service providers out there a little bit nervous…
Kristin Sunderman:
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.
George Socha:
A little bit nervous with the concern that their work is…. the need for them is going to be evaporating. It sounds like that’s not going to be the case. It’s going to be evolving and shifting.
Kristin Sunderman:
Exactly.
George Socha:
There’s going to be a role for all three groups here.
Kristin Sunderman:
Absolutely. And this is not new to vendors. There are vendors who have been doing this since paper days. They are very good at evolving and finding the needs. I think that this is just going to be another extension of that. Remote collections, remote review: those are going to be some very big areas for vendors that maybe were less so before. I think it’s fair to say that it’s changing, but I wouldn’t say it’s evaporating. My heart is with vendors. I was in the vendor world for a very long time, so I certainly see a lot of value there. But I think there’s going to be some adopting and that’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out.
The Ideal eDiscovery Platform: Do Everything, Never Increase the Data Footprint, and Ride on Top of the Data No Matter Where the Data Resides
George Socha:
You mentioned earlier, “make a wish”, so I’m going to ask you to make a wish. If you could have – you know what’s coming – if you could your ideal eDiscovery platform, no limitations whatsoever, everything is possible no matter how ridiculous, price is not at all a factor, anything you could want, think as narrowly or as expansively as you want: what would this ideal eDiscovery platform look like for you?
Kristin Sunderman:
George, I told you I tried very hard to come up with some exciting platform and I am so boring. I was not able to.
George Socha:
Sometimes the apparently boring is actually the most exciting.
Kristin Sunderman:
I still stick with, if you could have something that could also give me a foot massage while I was collecting my data, that would be great. No, you know, honestly, I think the first thing when I was thinking about, “What would that look like?” So much of what I would wish for is already coming out and is in fruition. The machine learning and that piece is like a dream come true from somebody who’s old school like me, who did sit in warehouses, reviewing documents back in the day. You know, all of these platforms that are coming out are mind blowing.
George Socha:
We don’t have to brush and blow the dust off the top of the boxes and worry about what we’re going to find when we open up the boxes.
Kristin Sunderman:
My figures don’t hurt. And those spiders jumping out, dead rats….
George Socha:
They’re turning brown and the oily feeling you get on it. We don’t have any of that anymore.
Kristin Sunderman:
No. And it’s pretty glorious. The first time I saw some of the analytic capabilities of machine learning, I got a little misty-eyed at how amazing it is, almost to where I wish I still did document review. It’d be great to be able to experience this.
I think for me, especially now moving in-house, if I were to say what would be the ideal platform, it would be a platform that could do everything I needed to do, obviously collect full, process, review, host, but not increase the data footprint. Right now that’s such a big deal because of collecting and pulling into another place. Data is growing exponentially as it is. Data management is such a huge part of what I’m now doing every day. It would be great if there were a tool that could do everything and give us the same results that we need without increasing the data footprint.
George Socha:
Let’s dive into that a little bit. By not including the data footprint, do you mean by that, that we wouldn’t have to, or you wouldn’t have to go into your system, make a copy of the data, take that copy somewhere else, send it there and then who knows? They make a copy of a portion of it and that goes somewhere else, and then they make a copy of a portion. And so that’s part of what you’re trying to avoid, right?
Kristin Sunderman:
Right.
George Socha:
Which I think then means that the technology would have to be able to ride on top of the data where it exists.
Kristin Sunderman:
It would. It’d be a behind the firewall solution. It would have to be.
George Socha:
Or at least be able to hook into what’s behind the firewall with a semipermeable membrane with the firewall there.
Kristin Sunderman:
All while being secure.
George Socha:
Absolutely.
Kristin Sunderman:
Easy, peasy.
George Socha:
I told you no limitations, right?
Kristin Sunderman:
That’s right. That’s right, I agree.
George Socha:
So, it will ride on top of data, wherever that data might be, even if it’s in multiple locations…
Kristin Sunderman:
Sure, no problems.
George Socha:
Everything’s possible.
Kristin Sunderman:
Anything.
George Socha:
It will create almost no additional footprint. Its additional footprint will be only that data which it needs to create and store itself and not any of the underlying data. Would it be able to inject new data into the existing data stores?
Kristin Sunderman:
Sure, sure. Why not?
George Socha:
Why not?
Kristin Sunderman:
Why not? We’re wishing here, right?
George Socha:
That’s right. What sort of data would you want injected into the existing data storage?
Kristin Sunderman:
Well, you know, I guess it depends on the case. And the input from the team. Yeah. I think data is such a big issue right now and it just keeps increasing and increasing and increasing. That’s probably the biggest pain point. As long as it can keep learning how to code documents and categorize them and doing all the cool things that it’s doing now with these advanced machine learning and analytics and artificial intelligence, I don’t know what else I could possibly want besides the foot massage.
George Socha:
It sounds like you’re also trying to make your records management counterparts happy. Information governance counterparts happy. Right?
Kristin Sunderman:
Right, right. I definitely am because she’s amazing. And I definitely want her on my team and on my side. Absolutely.
Thank you so much for having me on here. This has been fun.
George Socha:
Thank you. This has been great. Thank you, Kristin.
We have had with us as our guest today, Kristin Sunderman, who is Litigation Support Director, Legal Division at Freddie Mac. I am George Socha, this has been eDiscovery Leaders Live, hosted by ACEDS, and sponsored by Reveal.
Next week, joining us on January 15th will be David Stanton who is an eDiscovery partner at the Pillsbury law firm.
Kristin, thank you very much.
Kristin Sunderman:
Thanks George, bye-bye.