E-discovery has become ever-daunting for companies, as the number of electronic messages generated daily continues to soar. But the task is manageable if firms establish a culture of excellence and strong leadership.

"When I [got] to Facebook, one of the most important things I did early on was to figure out that we had a very small but incredible group of people doing e-discovery at the time," said Paul Grewal, who was deputy general counsel of the social media company for four years before becoming chief legal officer of Coinbase in 2020.

"But we didn't have senior leadership that was really focused on setting standards of excellence and really pushing the team to think bigger. So that was something I set to change relatively early."

He added that he had a similar experience at Coinbase—having "incredible people" doing the work of e-discovery but no dedicated leader—a gap he recently filled by appointing a director of e-discovery services.

Grewal spoke at a recent e-discovery-leadership webinar organized by Zapproved, a maker of discovery software. Grewal and fellow panelist Ellen Blanchard, the director of discovery and information governance at T-Mobile, agreed that technology is developing faster than companies can build technology to preserve, collect or review data.

Blanchard said in-house discovery teams need to have input into how long their companies keep data, where they keep it and "deciding that we're going to use one application versus 20 different applications."

Grewal agreed that one of the most important functions that a strong e-discovery team can perform is provoking a conversation.

"Our jobs include a lot of different things, but one of the most important jobs is to ask questions and to generate the conversation because there may be circumstances where a senior leader in the company may know the answer to the question or may understand how data is being maintained or what the options are," he said.

Grewal said e-discovery team needs to operate with a mindset of continuous improvement.

"We're committed to learning from [our mistakes] and getting better with each iteration," he said.

He added that making good e-discovery decisions requires input from people with strong technical talent, people steeped in the "minutiae of e-discovery," as well as people with a broader grasp of the company's purpose in resolving a dispute.

"That could be the legal team or the litigation team, a product leader, or folks from other parts of the organization that have nothing to do with the legal function," he said.

Grewal said the cloudy economic outlook will pressure e-discovery teams and their partners to do more with less through the rest of 2022.

"The pressures right now to deliver results have never been higher. The reality is that the challenges that we're facing—in terms of not just volumes but complexity—sophistication and significance to the success of the company have never been greater," he said.

"All of us are going to have to get even more focused on how we leverage technology and people to get more done, and think about new ways of collection, preservation and everything else."

Blanchard said the proliferation of messaging apps, each with its own protocols, has escalated the volume of data e-discovery teams must sift through and the technical challenges of doing so.

"You're talking about millions of messages every day in a tool like Slack or Teams compared to hundreds of thousands of emails. How do I get my arms around it?"