Amy Bowser-Rollins, Casepoint

E-discovery and project management provider Casepoint brought on Amy Bowser-Rollins full time as director of product and process improvement. The news comes as Casepoint shifts into providing services for the full litigation workflow.

Before coming into her current role, Bowser-Rollins worked part time at Casepoint since 2016, where she provided feedback on its overall product design and created its documentation and training material team. Prior to that, she worked as litigation support at law firm Robbins, Russell, Englert, Orseck, Untereiner & Sauber.

In this new role at Casepoint, Bowser-Rollins will continue to work closely with the product team and will assist in creating Casepoint's client and in-house feature request process. What's more, Bowser-Rollins also confirmed she will continue to update her Litigation Support Guru website.

On the heels of her appointment, Legaltech news spoke with Bower-Rollins to discuss the thinking behind Casepoint's recent changes, how she has seen e-discovery evolve her 35 years of litigation experience, and the biggest challenges e-discovery professionals are facing today.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Legaltech News: What from your prior experiences in e-discovery are you bringing to Casepoint?

Bowser-Rollins: My expertise has been in the law firm side, managing document review for large complex litigation cases. The document review itself lasts months, and there's a large team of document reviewers, so if you have that experience you have to have a process around it. When you are managing those people and the document review itself, you are using a product like Casepoint.

Can you discuss the thinking behind Casepoint's evolution and the role customization plays?

The legal team is logging in and out of products to get what they need done, and all they want to do is practice law. What we've decided to do at Casepoint is bring their entire workflow into one login basically. You log in, and you get all the legal technology solutions that you would need. In terms of all, we don't have all, but we have all the ones we think are the most impactful and the ones they use on a daily basis. What we've done so far is the e-discovery component, the document review component of it, but where we are going is matter management as a whole.

What service or technologies do you think will come to define the future of the e-discovery market?

What I've seen with our product and across the board, [is that] it takes way too long for attorneys to embrace a new technology. I'll go to a conference, I'll learn about a new technology several companies are working on or it's released, I get back to the law firm and the attorneys are like, 'There's nothing broken, there's nothing to fix.'

I've been in this industry a very long time. It takes five to 10 years for attorneys to embrace a new technology that we released that long ago. It happens over and over again. One of them is the AI [artificial intelligence] component, which is basically having the software do more automated tasks to help you practice law. You need to get into the documents and learn the documents as quickly as possible. … We've had this technology for a long time, but more legal teams are embracing it now. They are getting more comfortable with the idea that they might not set eyes on every single document, which is the way I grew up with document review. 

What role does modern technology play in e-discovery?

As the technology evolves in the day-to-day work of any corporation, when the litigation case happens, we are collecting documents from those products. We are collecting emails, we are collecting documents they've created and data from various devices. The cool thing is, as the technology out there in the world evolves, we have to keep up in the e-discovery industry. We have to know how to collect it, we have to know how to process it so we can give it to attorneys in an easy fashion for them to review. Again, I always say to my students and when I'm training a newbie, technology is just one part of it; all the attorneys want to do is practice law. They just want to practice law. The technology should help them.

What is the biggest challenge e-discovery practitioners face today?

Getting lawyers to embrace the technology. Convincing a lawyer that technology helps them. It's been an ongoing process, and I'm starting to see it become easier to convince attorneys. That's the biggest challenge. If you look at any of the data that's coming out in our industry, when people are surveyed, that's the common thing that people in my position are seeing. Getting the legal team to embrace the technology.