David Meadows, the new senior managing director of FTI Technology.

 

David Meadows has spent the last 25 years working in or around e-discovery and, well, some things have changed. For one thing, Meadows is now a senior managing director of FTI Technology, transitioning from a nearly seven year stint at Big Four behemoth EY, where he most recently served as the managing director of the forensics and integrity services practice.

Legaltech News spoke with Meadows about the challenges lurking in e-discovery's immediate future, which include navigating collection issues brought on by upstart communications channels such as Slack and an international tangle of privacy laws that adds another layer of potential jeopardy to the way data is handled and produced.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

LTN: We're seeing EY, Deloitte and other members of the Big Four push further into legal services and invest heavily in technology. How do incumbents in the legal services space like FTI distinguish themselves when more and more people are leveraging the same tech?

David Meadows: One of my favorite sayings is that everybody has Relativity these days. Even FTI, which wasn't a traditional Relativity shop, has Relativity now. How do you distinguish yourself when everyone is offering Relativity? …

You take that strong systems knowledge of Slack, Confluence and other systems and you combine that with our knowledge of legal technology, and we're able to create and develop unique solutions that others have not been able to create to solve problems for our clients.

We've seen e-discovery technology push its way into new territory such as India and Brazil, especially given the rise of local privacy laws. Do you think that privacy laws are going to continue to influence the growth of that technology and where it goes next?

I think the firms that can determine how to figure out privacy the best, like privilege, will be in a much stronger place going forward. And definitely it's a consideration when you start getting into Brazil, Canada, other countries as well where it's an evolving market. And the firms that have a global presence will probably be in the best position to understand those global privacy rules and be able to solve these problems.

Is that going to push more people to have that global presence?

I think that you're always going to have the smaller and middle tier players in the industry, because not every company wants or needs to spend a small fortune to solve a problem, depending on the risk. …

Those that have the more global presence will be able to deal with the challenges of managing privacy and other things globally for clients. And I'm already seeing that to an extent today, to be honest with you. I think that exists currently. I think that it's going to be enhanced as privacy regulations continue to push forward.

Corporate legal departments are looking to cut costs by bringing a lot of solutions in-house, including e-discovery solutions. Does that change your relationship as a service provider to corporate legal?

In 25 years of doing this, I've seen corporations bring things in-house and then take them back outside again multiple times at different organizations, depending on the leadership and what their approach was to it and whether they believed that they were going to save the organization bottom-line money at the end. …

They will always bring tools in-house trying to help. They will struggle to find qualified people willing to work in a corporate environment that realize they could get paid more if they go out into the consulting space. So there will always be a niche.

Players like the Big 4 obviously have a lot of technology to wield. As law firms look to provide similar services to clients, could that drive them to seek partnerships with legal service providers like FTI more closely?

We can forge stronger relationships with law firms specifically because we do not have the same independence issues that Big Four accounting firms have. That was one of the challenges that I've faced in the past was trying to forge a relationship with a law firm.

Even if you had the best technology in the world and a unique solution that nobody else had, the law firm couldn't engage you to use that many times because the clients or one of the clients involved with the litigation was an audit client. That will prevent from being able to work together on that particular engagement.