Three points of note about Pfizer’s lawyer-led e-discovery team

In the words of George Socha, a consultant who works with e-discovery systems, "Pfizer was the first company to hire a lawyer to build such a system from the ground up," Corp. Counsel, Vol. 13, Dec. 2006 at 80. That’s a distinction!

And, note that the lawyer -- Laura Kibbe, initially came to the attention of Pfizer through a secondment. Kaye Scholer loaned Kibbe to the pharmaceutical company in 2004 and it hired her in January 2005 (See my post of Sept. 21, 2005 on reserving the right to hire secondees.).

The third point is that Kibbe’s team "includes two other lawyers, two paralegals, two project managers, one technology manager, a senior operations manager, and various administrative assistants." At nearly a dozen people, the discovery team is larger than most law departments and extraordinarily focused (See my post of Sept. 10, 2005 on specialist roles in law departments.).