We thought this was an interesting hire….
Legaltech news reports and interviews Wendy Riggs
E-discovery veteran Wendy Riggs discusses the compliance challenges of dealing with homegrown tools and ever-evolving technology platforms.
Those working in legal operations at major technology companies are often at the forefront of the latest and greatest technology. Wendy Riggs knows this experience firsthand. And now, after nearly four years as Twitter’s senior manager of e-discovery and litigation operations, she’s bringing her expertise on compliance and collaboration to Keesal, Young & Logan. There, she will serve as a senior analyst and co-lead the firm’s Compliance, Operations and Data Control Advisory (CODA) Division.
Legaltech News spoke with Riggs about her new role, as well as her experience navigating tricky compliance and e-discovery challenges at one of the world’s most influential companies. Here are some highlights from the interview:
Plugged In
LTN: What was the most interesting part of working at Twitter?
Riggs: The area that I really found interesting was identifying where processes are necessary to ensure compliance. For instance, for preservation of data, we would need to identify data sources and then create streamlined workflows that involved participants across multiple teams.
What will happen is that you’ll have engineer teams that are very siloed that will develop internal business applications—for example, one that supports an HR team, they’ll create a tool to handle employee feedback and the like. But those tools are built to put data in, not necessarily get data out. So it’s really interesting to try to work with those teams and figure out what our options are and approaching it from a learning perspective. Saying, “OK, perhaps you could include us when you’re building out homegrown tools and implementing a new tool, because these are the considerations you want to keep in mind during the planning and development phases.”
I say one of my key roles, and how I approach things generally, is to bring in-house teams together. In-house engineering teams are working to try to move the business forward and the product forward, and that is where their head is. … But my role is just to provide a little more insight into corporate risk and why we might want to do things a certain way.
What in-house processes and technologies did you implement at Twitter?
I was focused on data mapping and assisting in the creation of custodian interview questionnaires to ensure that we were personally touching our custodians to educate them on the process and to understand what data source they had corporate data living in.
Also, I was involved in vendor selection and management, and I oversaw e-billing and the rollout of our e-billing processes to our international partners.
What types of data did your e-discovery projects deal with?
The e-discovery front at Twitter, and I suspect maybe also at many other companies, is about corporate-related data. For user-generated content, you’re usually dealing with government requests and things like that, and that is going to flow mainly through the legal policy or a law enforcement team, and that was not part of what I had to deal with. However, in certain situations if we had plaintiffs, say from a privacy consumer class action suit, we would deal with that. But there is a lot of consent that goes along with obtaining user-generated content, so it’s a very tricky dynamic.
What legal and e-discovery challenges are unique to technology companies?
Twitter and Zynga, like many of their peer companies out there, have the same issues, and the types of cases you are going to see somewhat overlap. Consumer class actions related to privacy, breach of contract, patent cases, employment matters, securities litigation—there is just a host of those things. And based on the case, and of course data sources, each could be different.
Whether you’re Twitter or Zynga or just any tech-related company, you are all grappling with the same issues in the e-discovery area. It’s simply because they are interested in new tools that are being developed out there, especially on the [consumer] side. If they think there is something out there that can help them move faster or be more nimble, then that is something that as an e-discovery professional you need to deal with. You need to understand what is sitting in those tools and if the data is secure.
What trends are defining the future of corporate e-discovery and legal operations?
You can see a change now. Groups like CLOC are elevating the conversation, and you have in-house teams working lean in terms of team members and budget. So the focus is really on being efficient and saving costs. And also transparency—we see a lot of internal teams taking more of a hands-on approach, so they have more insight into their spend and e-discovery vendor [selection and management].
I just think that whole ecosystem is changing, and we are at the forefront of that, and we are only going to see more and more growth in legal operations.
http://www.legaltechnews.com/id=1202793180237/Former-Twitter-EDiscovery-Manager-Moves-From-Big-Tech-to-Big-Law?slreturn=20170618163417
