Bringing It All Back Home: Laura Kibbe of Pfizer

It was June 2000, and Laura Kibbe, then an associate at Kaye Scholer’s New York office, had to deal with e-discovery for the first time. Her client, Pfizer Inc., had just acquired a company whose diabetes drug had been pulled off the market and was being attacked in civil suits. Kibbe, confronting her first mass tort case, had no formal tech background. She recalls that “the plaintiffs were already into discovery, making requests for e-mail and databases. I had to figure out how to get [that to them] and what to do with it. And I didn’t even know the language.”

Kibbe, 38, has come a long way from barely knowing a megabyte from an overbite. Seconded to Pfizer for 2004, she worked on the mass tort case as well as other e-discovery demands. The New York-based pharmaceutical giant liked her work so much that it hired her in January 2005 as full-time senior counsel to create the company’s own e-discovery system. In the last 22 months, Kibbe has put together the technology and people to form a nationally recognized e-discovery program. It includes her own handpicked discovery response team of lawyers, paralegals and tech experts.