“Googleplex”, Google Headquarters, Mountain View. Photo: Shutterstock.

Google's former director of legal, discovery and litigation support, Pamela Davis said that her former department was “like 'Fight Club'” when she was there—people couldn't talk about what they were doing.

But when she spoke at the Summit on Legal Innovation and Disruption Thursday in San Francisco, Davis opened up about her former department's growth during her almost eight years there.

When Davis joined Mountain View-based Google's discovery team in 2010, she said it was small and inefficient, sometimes spending over $10 million on one case, without getting great quality in return from outside service providers. She knew there was a better way to invest that money, and began putting resources into hiring more in-house lawyers at Google with a deep passion for discovery.

“For me, technology is really, super important, AI is a game changer, but none of that really works without the people,” she said.

When she joined Google, she had a team of only three people, a number that eventually grew astronomically under her leadership, in part due to her mission to find lawyers passionate about discovery work in-house.

“When I came to Google my hypothesis was, what would happen if you really invested in the people?” she said. “And then I went out and found those people.”

The people Davis hired were “excited about discovery and wanted to make it a career,” and Google became a place where that career path was a possibility, she said. She trained lawyers, paralegals and other in-house staff with a passion for discovery and gave them in-house responsibilities as part of the team.

“Really the key, the thing that made it all successful was the people, and I'm quite proud of that,” she said. “We were able to make a career in this business. That I love, and I'm very proud of that.”

Davis said her investment in other passionate people paid off. When she left last year, Davis noted that the discovery team had grown to just under 90 people and was saving Google more than 80 percent of its discovery costs.

“We had turned discovery from a weakness to a strength,” she said.