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Corporate Legal Teams Share Their 2016 e-Discovery Resolutions

Dean Gonsowski

Throughout the week, we’ve been sharing e-discovery resolutions from professionals across the industry. We heard how law firms are planning to implement and leverage technology and how some service providers are gearing up to tackle e-discovery at a global scale.

Today, our series on New Year’s resolutions comes to an end, as we hear from four different corporate legal departments. In this last post, we decided to ask our participants not only about their resolutions at work, but also what they want to achieve outside the office.

aaron-crews_120x120Aaron Crews, senior associate general counsel at Walmart

"2016 is what I am calling "the year of implementation." We spent 2015 building out an end-to-end e-discovery process and a true information governance strategy. We will spend 2016 banging those programs into place and getting them fully implemented across the enterprise. This huge undertaking will require the skills of an amazing and talented team, so my resolution is to be the kind of leader I would want to follow; one who hires, trains, and promotes great people, empowers those people to think big and make the tactical decisions necessary to execute our strategies, and promotes a connected team that constantly talks about what we are doing, how we can improve, and what we can learn from mistakes that are made. 

I have three very simple resolutions in my personal life: better quality time with my wife and kids; disconnect from technology and be truly present when talking to other people; and recommit to investing in myself every single day."

eric-lieber_120x120Eric Lieber, director of legal technology at Toyota Motor Sales

"At work, I have three goals in mind: improve the reuse of prior collections and document coding; improve our workflow for documents containing foreign languages; and reevaluate information governance from an e-discovery perspective. In terms of personal goals, I’d like to read more. Also, as the political season heats up, remembering the ability to “disagree without being disagreeable” will be essential."

shawn-cheadle_120x120Shawn Cheadle, general counsel at Lockheed Martin

"My resolutions for 2016 include a personal commitment to use my standing workstation more frequently while in the office. I also resolve to provide additional educational opportunities on how better information governance improves e-discovery practice."

These are all great and I’m thankful for everyone sharing their thoughts. While I’m not an in-house attorney currently, I did want to share my resolutions—maybe putting them out in the blogosphere will force me to have greater resilience. 

My professional goal is to figure out the root cause of the consumption gap between available and utilized technology. From a software provider’s perspective, it’s easy to think about constantly building innovative applications, but in the legal world there’s often a reluctance to use the technologies already available. This lack of adoption doesn’t bode well for an evolving profession, and I’d like to better understand how to better solve this challenge.

Personally, I’d like to read old-fashioned (paper) books more in 2016. Simply sitting down and not multi-tasking with a good book should help my focus and work/life balance. Easier said than done, as with all of these.


A former litigator/GC/AGC, Dean Gonsowski is an industry-recognized evangelist, thought leader, and speaker. Dean has a JD from the University of San Diego School of Law and a BS from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has worked with companies around the e-discovery industry, including Relativity, and now serves as chief revenue officer of Active Navigation.

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