Keith Laska is the new CEO of Hanzo. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

Keith Laska gets to add another CEO title to his resume as he assumes the big chair at e-discovery and compliance tech company Hanzo. The spot was previously occupied by Kevin Gibson, who will remain with the company as executive chairman.

Laska, who previously served as CEO and co-founder of EUXmedia, is no stranger to Hanzo, having served on the company's board since 2016. He comes into the new role just as Hanzo relocates management of the company from Europe to the U.S.

But what comes after that? Laska thinks that the rise of the chief legal risk officer position within enterprise organizations is only a few short years away, which means turning the focus towards solutions that enable a more proactive approach to managing legal risk before it metastasizes into litigation.

The below interview was edited for clarity.

LTN: You've been on the Hanzo board since 2016. Why was now the right time for you to step into the position of CEO?

Keith Laska: I think there is a lot of change happening within the legal risk and compliance markets. A lot of the customers that we have are in the U.S. A lot of the innovation is in the U.S. And so the executive chairman—who I've worked with on a number of occasions before and work closely with in Hanzo—and I and the board all kind of discussed this and decided it's the right time to kind of move the management of the company officially over to the U.S. and access that opportunity.

What do you think has been the most significant change within the industry in the last couple of years?

We've now kind of realized with our new product set—we have products across the whole EDRM—that the battlefield is not just in supporting active litigation. There's an entire industry that's built under that, right?… And so really the new vision and enhanced vision is of course around supporting active litigation with the products we have but really focusing in on enabling legal operations to solve problems before the start, whether it be employment harassment with the rise of the Me Too movement, whether that be a trade secret, an IP theft.

Besides the recent launch of Hanzo Dynamic Investigator for Compliance, what other opportunities to do you guys see for yourselves moving further down that road?

We've got a strategy that's pretty aggressive, and it's largely around wanting to promote the entire legal and compliance team to a new role in the enterprise. So I actually see a convergence of risk officer, general counsel, chief legal officer, and compliance officer to a super role that takes front stage at the boardroom and executive table, and that will be chief legal risk officer. … Literally our entire industry is at [the start of] an evolution inside the enterprise, and the evolution is about elevating the compliance and legal profession, which is primarily a “don't worry about it, they can fix it after the fact” role to one that is super strategic and a part of all conversations.

How should companies be thinking about the way that they approach data that may be scattered across different social media channels?  

Every time I speak with our customers, and we talk about public data or bridging this gap between enterprise data or public data, they always say one thing to me: “That's something we need to get ahead of.” … I think it's a complex problem because you have exobytes and exobytes of information out on the web, and if you look at the traditional EDRM process, you're trying to distill it into kilobytes. …The company that can actually piece together the fragmented pieces of the puzzle is really going to be the company that will ultimately change this industry long-term.

Is ephemeral messaging something that you think is going to be problem for the industry one day?

Wherever there's a solution to try and combat fraud and find the truth, there's going to be a counter solution to hide it. And I'm confident the industry at large will find solutions to that. I'm confident one of the answers is AI. … Ultimately what I mean in terms of that particular use is drawing corollary kind of evidence points. You might not be able to find the smoking gun, but if you can find three or four data points using AI that kind of support your claim to 75 or 80 percent, then you probably have a situation. … If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.