Jessica Watts.

Jessica Watts is no stranger to legal department efficiency. As discovery counsel and associate general counsel for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, she helped reduce the company's total discovery spend by 71 percent in a period of six years. Yet corporate legal is far from the only arena where Watts, in her 20-year career, has made her mark. A recognized e-discovery expert, Watts speaks at industry conferences and is looked to for advice on the practice.

Watts recently joined legal services provider Counsel on Call as director of business development. She spoke with Legaltech News about her work in the e-discovery and corporate legal worlds, and where she sees the legal industry heading.

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Plugged In

LTN: This is an interesting move for you. Will you be handling a lot of e-discovery work in your role?

JW: I don't do a lot of e-discovery work, but I certainly am a subject matter expert, and we have clients that need help on the review side. Through all of my e-discovery work, I've learned a little about the different types of databases and managed services for particularly in-house counsel. So in talking to clients, we're able to find their current pressure points.

We do a lot of M&A work, contract extraction, and with all the [General Data Protection Regulation] stuff that's coming out, manage their procurement contracts making sure they're compliant. That's all on top of the e-discovery stuff we think about.

Where are businesses at on the road to GDPR compliance?

It's the big hot-button issue right now. It's on everybody's radar, and I have seen the gamut of people who are very well prepared for May, and clients who are still working on their plans to get prepared for May.

How does it feel to sort of step back from the e-discovery world?

My last job title was director, e-discovery. I did a lot of other types of work in that. In particular, when you look at operations type of work at legal departments, there was a lot of reporting, a lot of metrics for litigation departments that I worked on. So I had a lot of contact within our legal department with people in other areas to see where their pressure points were.

For instance, we were working on how to digitize our I-9s as a company, and so working with our compliance and HR teams as the e-discovery person, I have knowledge of the best processes of how to digitize documents.

It's good to broaden my horizons on all of legal services as opposed to just e-discovery, but it's not something that's brand new to me either.

How did you get into e-discovery?

I had a case—I was working for EDS at the time—where we had a large stock drop that at the end of the day involved [New York Stock Exchange], [Securities and Exchange Commission] and [Department of Justice] investigations, 26 shareholder lawsuits, six [Employee Retirement Income Security Act] and six derivatives all over the same time. And it was a tremendous amount of discovery and very short turnaround. Working for a company called Electronic Data Systems, the vast majority of our information, even back then, was electronic. So we quickly had to come up with the tools and attorneys we would use to review that information.

In your view, do you think the evolution of the e-discovery industry has been slow?

I don't. I think it's been very quick. If I look at when I began practicing law—I'm a 20-year attorney—everything was on paper, and it used to go to warehouses. In 20 years, in less than a generation of lawyers, we've completely changed the practice of discovery.

Being an e-discovery expert, what are your thoughts on the most recent Sedona Principles?

So I was at the Sedona Conference last March. We talked about basically the role of technology and what it's doing for us. It's still all about proportionality. It's still all about finding the best and most efficient way forward, and I think that there are some of the very best legal minds in the community that are working on these principles. And they're doing a great job.

What about the next iteration of what's in legal tech?

It's all about AI right now, about the analytics, about, 'How can we take this huge corpus of information and drill down to find what we need for these cases?' And it's just getting those analytics, those tools to be better and faster.