When I wrote my recent post, Human Leadership in an AI World: Reflections from Relativity Fest 2025, I explored what it means to lead in an era defined by artificial intelligence and how technology is reshaping decisions, teams, and expectations for leaders everywhere. That reflection got me thinking about something more personal and perhaps even more timeless: the soft skills that still define our success as professionals and as people.

This October, I attended Relativity Fest 2025 in Chicago. As one of the industry’s flagship events, I expected meaningful discussions about innovation, AI, and the challenges shaping our field, and those expectations were absolutely met.

It’s a familiar scene: the eDiscovery lead launches into a deep dive on deduplication metrics for an upcoming trial, while your eyes scan the room for a quiet escape. Or flip it – you’re trying to outline a tight trial timeline and get no reaction from your eDiscovery vendor – because the dataset is three terabytes, and no one's talked budget yet.

Let’s get one thing straight: paralegals are the glue that holds litigation together. As a paralegal, you know you are typically the first to know when discovery deadlines are looming and the last to leave when a production goes out the door. So let’s talk about eDiscovery in a way that gives you the confidence to own your role in it.

In Part 1 of this series, we laid the groundwork for why eDiscovery matters. Now it’s time to get practical. Because once you’ve preserved the data, the real adventure begins.

If you work in litigation and haven’t dealt with eDiscovery yet, you either bill in a parallel universe or you’ve been very, very lucky. However, as digital data continues to multiply, even the smallest matters now involve some form of electronically stored information (ESI).

We recently partnered with EDRM for a webinar titled “How to Talk to Your Litigators About eDiscovery”, where I co-presented with Francesca Morency, a litigator and Partner at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. We dug into what litigators really care about when eDiscovery comes up - and how Litigation Support and eDiscovery professionals can meet those needs without diving so deep into technical details that litigators tune out.

If you've worked in eDiscovery for any length of time, you know the story: overcomplicated platforms, bloated pricing models, and clunky user experiences. Before founding QuikData, I spent years watching legal professionals wrestle with tools that were supposed to help them, but honestly, I saw a lot of legal teams struggling with technology that was only holding them back.