E-discovery firm Redgrave's partners Erica Zolner and Victoria Redgrave talk about what ChatGPT means for the legal market, its potential to help e-discovery processes and the impact of the current economy on their law firm.
Legaltech News - February 2, 2023
By Isha Marathe
In January, e-discovery and information governance-centered boutique law firm Redgrave LLP announced the return of Victoria Redgrave in the role of managing partner and chair of the firm’s executive committee. Additionally, Erica Zolner also became equity partner and the chair of the firm’s management committee.
To date, Redgrave remains one of the few women-led, e-discovery law firms in the country.
Only a year ago, the firm launched its tech subsidiary, Redgrave Data to help develop custom solutions for clients’ e-discovery, cybersecurity and forensic needs, among others.
Redgrave and Zolner talked to Legaltech News about the value placed on gender parity at the firm and its subsidiary, what new technologies they think will impact the legal market the most, and how an economic downturn will impact their firm.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Legaltech News: What stands out to me is not simply that you are a women-led firm, but a tech-centric women-led firm. Can you talk about the significance of this? Why is it still so rare?
Victoria Redgrave: One of the things that we’ve been very proud of since the beginning of Redgrave in 2010 has just been the positions that women have held in our firm. And being in a practice area that is technology-focused, having such great women leaders that can really be role models for other practitioners and for women to get involved in the more technical aspect of the practices is exciting.
I was a chemistry major, and I’ll show my age, but I was one of the few women in the science building, I was the only woman in the research lab. I sold chemicals for a few years, and I was the only woman sales rep calling on all the gentleman in Indiana and Western Kentucky. So I got used to being the only woman in the room.
How wonderful it is now to be one woman among many on at our firm, even as we’ve kind of bridged over to Redgrave Data.
Erica Zolner: I have a daughter, and she has a book called “Women in Science,” and we would read a chapter every night. It would focus on a different woman who had done something incredibly impressive in the field of science. And I remember her saying to me at one point or another, do they have this book for men? And I think I responded with, “We’ve got an encyclopedia for that.”
Our firm is 50% women [and] 75% of our managing directors who are technical gurus at Redgrave are women. And it’s just a fact that, if you feel included, and if you see people that look like you and make you feel comfortable, you’re more likely to want to come to an organization, because you’re going to feel like you’re going to be supported. And I think we’re doing a really good job of that.
[Law] has been a really hard place for women to break into … let’s not forget that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was all alone in a photo not hundreds of years ago, but [mere decades] ago. Progress is being made, but it’s not as fast as I would like to see it being made. I think we’re at the forefront of helping progress [along] more rapidly.
It’s been a year since the launch of Redgrave Data. How has the firm and the company worked together since?
Zolner: They really do think about technology and legal technology differently. They’ve got lawyers who have practiced law and understand the importance of the intersection of law and technology, but they’ve also got data scientists and coders and people that have built data software from the ground up.
One of the other things that I really liked about Redgrave Data and one of the things that they’ve been able to do for one of my clients is offer superb client service when it comes to what they call the Black Coffee option for thinking about vendor management and vendor work. … It’s the first time that I’ve ever worked with a vendor where it’s been so not “set it and forget it.”
What are some key tech innovations that intersect with legal you are watching in the coming months?
Zolner: Ephemeral messaging, what’s happening with Slack and Teams and the G Suite of internal IM’ing is something I think everyone has an eye on right now, because there is litigation popping up left and right, where organizations are being held to a pretty high bar with respect to what they’re doing internally to preserve chats and internal items.
I think from my perspective, one of the most interesting things right now is like the whole world of ChatGPT and how all these large language models are going to be used in the future. In some ways it feels like Chicken Little’s “The Sky is Falling,” you know, it’s coming after us. We’re not gonna have jobs anymore in technical writing, we’re not going to have computer programmers. And the most recent issue, if you’ve heard about it is that, apparently. … ChatGPT took the bar and passed. It’s almost like, you know, where we were three or four years ago or maybe longer with self-driving cars.
[But] if we can find a way to use these tools to help with TAR, constructing search terms, thinking through search queries, I think it’s going to be seen as a partner … rather than a replacement, because, as I’m sure you recognize, certain things cannot just be replaced by a robot. It’s impossible.
Redgrave: One of the things that’s a little bit different in terms of how to leverage technology, AI, the modeling is that we have been really looking at pain points with our clients. One of them being privilege and the cost of privilege review, the risk of documents being inadvertently produced, and so we’ve been really looking at ways to leverage technology to do better in terms of not only privilege identification, but also privilege logging, because that’s the other thing where our clients are having a real pain point in terms of costs.
Given the fears of an economic downturn and a recession, we’ve seen the “tech bubble” burst, according to some. From your perspective, how does this impact the work of a firm like Redgrave? How does it impact the industry at large?
Redgrave: I guess the good news for us is that we’re in a space where our issues just don’t disappear in a bad economy. You know, we’re not in public finance or private equity where there might be lulls in work. Litigation continues to go on, and technologies continue to evolve and be adopted.
Zolner: Unfortunately, we have seen clients who are experiencing, you know, what I will call pre-recession jitters. And there have been layoffs at some of our clients’ organizations. We’re seeing this all across the board when it comes to tech companies and the tech hemisphere.
[So] some might say this is, you know, just right-sizing or scaling. It has nothing to do with the recession. … But whatever is going on, people are losing their jobs, which is very unfortunate.
But I do think it means that clients are less able to rely on in-house counsel, because they have fewer in-house counsel to rely upon. And we are seeing an uptick on more clients coming to us for things like information governance and e-discovery consultation and actually sometimes e-discovery partnerships, because they have fewer people internally that they can rely upon to get the work done. And they need to have help. And so we’ve been helping with that.