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September 13, 2021
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Colleagues: Sometimes, we need to leap for our clients and then make the proverbial net appear. I'd like to congratulate a team that recently signed up for an impossible task and then found a way to overdeliver. In mid-July, John Willems received a somewhat panicked phone call from a Ford in-house attorney with a question: Can Miller Canfield put together a team to complete – by July 31! – a review of 70,000 documents in a in a code-red, highly sensitive suit brought against one of Ford's autonomous vehicle subsidiaries? The answer obviously could not be "um…no," but what kind of "yes!" could it be? John called Kim Scott, who without hesitation said, "sure, we can do that!" – and soon was grappling with buyer's remorse as she considered the magnitude of the challenge. By 5 p.m. on the day of Ford's request, John and Kim were on a conference call with lawyers from Ford and Gibson Dunn (with whom Ford had previously also worked) and got schooled on the sprawling document mess, aggressiveness of plaintiffs' counsel, looming production deadlines, and urgency and sensitivity of the matter. The suit was brought in Delaware by four founders of tech companies in the autonomous mobility space that Ford had purchased and whom Ford subsequently terminated for fraud and other inappropriate business conduct. The issues, discovery and document cache were wide-ranging, reaching into the acquisition process at the highest level of Ford's business as well as Ford's investigation into, and termination of, the founders. By the time of that call, Kim had already swung into action. Her top-line team of reviewers had dispersed during COVID, and only three of them were immediately available. Even with Destini Wells managing the complex project management tasks while working on the review, our resources at that point were far from what we needed to meet Ford's deadlines. The success of the venture depended on both starting the work and scaling up our team as immediately as possible. And it has been an unquestionable success: within two days we were working, and by the following week our team was fully scaled and grinding its way 24/7 through the mass of documents. Kim and Destini managed the working relationship with Gibson Dunn and the data hosting vendor with the kind of aplomb, professionalism and expertise that had their inboxes overflowing with praise and gratitude from Gibson Dunn (along with all the additional work they could think of dumping on us beyond the initial batch of documents.) While the initial assignment was limited to a First Level Review of a specified document cache, the quality of our eDiscovery group's work inspired Gibson Dunn to turn over Second Level Review, privilege reviews of various batches, one-shot overnight reviews of specific batches, as well as deposition preparation – all work it had originally kept to itself. A special shoutout has to be made to two persons who are doing most of the heavy lifting: Destini Wells, whose contributions to this work effort have been jaw-dropping to observe, and Matt Linden, Destini's main backup and fill-in who not only acted as lead reviewer but also seamlessly stepped into the project manager role when Destini was otherwise occupied. An equal amount of recognition has to go to a number of invaluable folks inside the firm's business machinery who were indispensable in accomplishing all this in such a short time, including the recruiting effort, harnessing the unique and problematic tech needed and navigating the byzantine Ford working attorney approval and billing process: Susanna Brennan – recruited staff attorney candidates, conducted screening to ensure they were a right fit for the team, and assisted with onboarding Jennifer Shilson – assisted with offer letter and Canadian law requirements for staff attorney based in Windsor Michelle Crockett – assisted with staff offer letters and onboarding Lora Herbert – assisted with obtaining software and equipment necessary for the review and coordinated delivery of equipment to the staff attorneys Alison Braman – assisted team with setting up Citrix program required for project, made sure it was loaded on all laptops before being delivered to the staff attorneys, and helped with troubleshooting issues that popped up when using the program Mike Carter – assisted with setting up staff attorney accounts and troubleshooting iNet issues Katie Witkowski – assisted with getting staff approved as timekeepers by the Client Millie Harris – coordinated Ford's billing process This was a great example of folks at every level of the firm coming together and doing their part to make a success story to make us all proud. Megan |
Lora Herbert
Mike Carter
Millie Harris Not pictured: Matthew Linden |
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