David Moran, COO, Xact Data Discovery E-discovery has long lived at the center of the legal technology sphere, but new developments around artificial intelligence and analytics platforms have pushed e-discovery groups to grow, often painfully, with the times. Xact Data Discovery (XDD) recently brought aboard David Moran to serve as the company's chief operating officer, a new position for the company. Moran comes from nearly 20 years of work with travel management group Carlson Wagonlit and an additional seven years spent on the board at XDD, and in his new position will primarily work on streamlining XDD's operations procedures around forensics, project management, project engineering, managed review and staffing. LTN caught up with Moran to talk about his new role: Legaltech News: What makes XDD a good fit for you? XDD is also an organization that is growing quickly. There are a lot of parallels to my previous roles as an executive with [travel management company] Carlson Wagonlit. Having served on the board of directors at XDD for seven-plus years had given me a base of knowledge and familiarity with both the industry and the XDD leadership team. In your new role, you've been tasked with optimizing XDD's operational processes. Where do you imagine that work will start? There are many areas that provide opportunity for automation and driving further efficiencies. Particular areas that come to mind are analytics and managed review. The more we can automate, the more we can deploy the valuable time of our review attorneys to more complex, value-added work. There's a lot of hype around new technologies like AI in e-discovery work. What role do you see for these new computing innovations? There are both mature companies and startups that are bringing new and sometimes disruptive innovations every day. In my previous organization, we worked with an incubator in Silicon Valley, Plug and Play, to identify and work with early-stage startups as a way to get an early look at what is coming, and to identify and partner with innovative technology startups. The nature of the work we do lends itself to technology-enabled innovation. The more we can be proactive in looking at this, the better we will be in servicing our customers and helping to shape the future or electronic discovery. You'll be sitting on XDD's M&A advisory team. Are there particular areas of growth you're hoping to push XDD into? There are scale and scope acquisitions. Scale acquisitions are about becoming more efficient and driving economies of scale by looking at others that are doing what we do. Scope acquisitions are about becoming stronger and extending our end-to-end services. We will look at both types of acquisitions, in the sense that they help us to add value to the clients that we service. We recognize that our exceptional customer service and agility are something that we want to continue to be focused on, so the culture of organizations will be really important to the integration and how we merge companies that we acquire. What lessons from your previous work do you think you'll likely draw from most? I was with Carlson Wagonlit just under 18 years and during that time, we doubled in size twice, globalized and built an exceptional organizational culture while earning reputation of being client-centric. XDD has the same orientation, and we will look to do the same. Delta Airlines talks about the virtuous circle: Take care of the employees, taking care of employees means they take care of customers, taking care of customers takes care of shareholders. I believe the same. We need to make sure that we are an employer of choice and we do a good job of engaging our employees because it all starts with our employees.