Those working in legal operations at major technology companies are often at the forefront of the latest and greatest technology. Wendy Riggs knows this experience firsthand. And now, after nearly four years as Twitter's senior manager of e-discovery and litigation operations, she's bringing her expertise on compliance and collaboration to Keesal, Young & Logan. There, she will serve as a senior analyst and co-lead the firm's Compliance, Operations and Data Control Advisory (CODA) Division.
Legaltech News spoke with Riggs about her new role, as well as her experience navigating tricky compliance and e-discovery challenges at one of the world's most influential companies. Here are some highlights from the interview:
Plugged In
LTN: What was the most interesting part of working at Twitter?
Riggs: The area that I really found interesting was identifying where processes are necessary to ensure compliance. For instance, for preservation of data, we would need to identify data sources and then create streamlined workflows that involved participants across multiple teams.
What will happen is that you'll have engineer teams that are very siloed that will develop internal business applications for example, one that supports an HR team, they'll create a tool to handle employee feedback and the like. But those tools are built to put data in, not necessarily get data out. So it's really interesting to try to work with those teams and figure out what our options are and approaching it from a learning perspective. Saying, "OK, perhaps you could include us when you're building out homegrown tools and implementing a new tool, because these are the considerations you want to keep in mind during the planning and development phases."
I say one of my key roles, and how I approach things generally, is to bring in-house teams together. In-house engineering teams are working to try to move the business forward and the product forward, and that is where their head is. But my role is just to provide a little more insight into corporate risk and why we might want to do things a certain way.
What in-house processes and technologies did you implement at Twitter?
I was focused on data mapping and assisting in the creation of custodian interview questionnaires to ensure that we were personally touching our custodians to educate them on the process and to understand what data source they had corporate data living in.
Also, I was involved in vendor selection and management, and I oversaw e-billing and the rollout of our e-billing processes to our international partners.