At Relativity Fest in Chicago, I interviewed Megan Rowland of Inventus. Since the interview, Legility and Inventus have come together under the name Legility. Megan Rowland is Team Lead, Project Management at Legility.

I asked her what makes a good project manager. You take it for granted that they are knowledgeable, but they must also have good communication skills, be flexible, approachable and personable. It seemed worth asking the reciprocal question – what makes a good client?

The key thing, Megan Rowland said, is that the client is transparent about its expectations so that everybody knows what the target is. Not all deadlines are known at the beginning but it is extremely helpful to be told about them when they become known.

Increasingly, Megan Rowland said, clients are coming to Legility with an understanding of what is changing in the discovery process. Older technologies like email threading are a given but it remains a challenge to get them to understand active learning.

How do you get clients to buy into this technology? The key attraction, and the thing clients find most persuasive, is prioritisation and the efficiencies which that brings. Although the benefits of having documents in order of presumed importance seem obvious, many clients still want their documents chronologically or by custodian.

I asked Megan Rowland about recruitment into the industry. How would you now sell the concept to new entrants, including those still at university? Megan Rowland said that it is a challenge to find people with the mixed skills, including the technology skills, required for eDiscovery. Perhaps, she said, those already in the industry should go into law schools and talk about those opportunities at compnaies like Legility, as well as encouraging younger people to come to conferences like Relativity Fest.

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