The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in the Legal Profession

Tess Blair and her team offer full-cycle electronic discovery and information governance services to organizations across the globe. Tess is the founder and leader of Morgan Lewis’s eData practice, which seeks to combine great lawyering with technology and process to deliver real efficiency and value to clients. The team includes both lawyers and technologists who support a state-of-the-art data center and technology portfolio to deliver comprehensive counseling and technical services under one roof.

As the leader of the eData team, Tess works with lawyers and clients to develop and implement strategies to successfully manage complex litigation. A recognized thought leader in electronic discovery, she has developed industry-leading best practices that are designed to provide clients with sensible, defensible options for the discovery process. A Six Sigma Green Belt, Tess invests heavily in training the entire eData team in Legal Project Management and Legal Lean Sigma.

As a Morgan Lewis partner, Tess counsels and defends clients primarily in the areas of product liability, mass torts, and complex commercial litigation. A considerable portion of her practice involves the defense of clients in national serial litigation and class actions.

Tess lectures regularly on civil procedure and eDiscovery, and writes frequently on eDiscovery and information governance for legal publications. She is ranked by Chambers USA and Chambers Global in their listings of leading business attorneys. Bringing entrepreneurial experience to her clients, Tess started and operated a small business before entering law. She also holds a master of professional studies in law firm management.

Maura R. Grossman is a Research Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada, as well as an eDiscovery attorney and consultant in New York. Previously, Professor Grossman was Of Counsel at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, where for 17 years, she represented Fortune 100 companies and major financial institutions in corporate and securities litigation and white collar criminal and regulatory investigations, and advised lawyers and clients on legal, technical, and strategic issues involving eDiscovery and information governance, both domestically and abroad.

Professor Grossman is a well-known and influential eDiscovery lawyer. She has been described in Who’s Who E-Discovery Analysis as “‘sensational’ according to her peers and . . . a ‘go-to’ in the area.” Chambers & Partners USA Litigation: E-Discovery has described her as “the best-known person in the area of technology-assisted review; a superstar among superstars,” “hugely experienced,” and “widely regarded as one of the foremost experts on technology assisted review (TAR) . . . ‘judges rely on her as much, if not more than any other lawyer’ in the field of search and TAR.” Professor Grossman’s scholarly work on TAR, most notably, Technology-Assisted Review in E-Discovery Can Be More Effective and More Efficient Than Exhaustive Manual Review, published in the Richmond Journal of Law and Technology in 2011, has been widely cited in case law, both in the U.S. and elsewhere. Her longstanding contributions to eDiscovery technology and process were featured in the February 2016 issue of The American Lawyer, the September 2016 ABA Journal – where she was recognized as a 2016 Legal Rebel – and by the American Bar Association, which named her as one of its ten 2017 Women in Legal Tech.

Professor Grossman was co-chair of the eDiscovery Working Group advising the New York State Unified Court System from 2010 through 2015. She has served as a court-appointed special master, neutral/mediator, and eDiscovery expert to the court in multiple high-profile federal cases. She has provided eDiscovery training to federal and state court judges, by invitation of the court, and has testified, on several occasions, before the Advisory Committees on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and on the Evidence Rules, at their invitation.

Professor Grossman has taught eDiscovery courses at Columbia Law School, Pace Law School, and Rutgers Law School–Newark. She has been involved in the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Text Retrieval Conference (“TREC”); in 2008 and 2009, as a topic authority, and in 2010 and 2011, as a coordinator, of the Legal Track, and in 2015 and 2016, as a coordinator of the Total Recall Track. Professor Grossman serves on the Steering Committee of The Sedona Conference? Working Group 1 on Best Practices for Electronic Document Retention and Production, as well as on the Advisory Boards of Bloomberg BNA’s Digital Discovery & e-Evidence Report, the Georgetown University Law Center’s Advanced eDiscovery Institute, the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law’s Cardozo Data Law Initiative, and the Arizona State University-Arkfeld eDiscovery and Digital Evidence Conference.

Professor Grossman graduated with an A.B., magna cum laude, from Brown University. She earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Clinical/School Psychology from the Gordon F. Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies at Adelphi University, and a J.D., magna cum laude, Order of the Coif, from the Georgetown University Law Center. While at Georgetown, Professor Grossman served as Executive Notes and Comments Editor of the Georgetown Law Journal.