Epiq Global: Simplifying eDiscovery with Snowflake
Hashmap on Tap Episode #75
“Risk is essentially doing something where you are not sure about the outcome. Failure or failing fast is what leads to experience. Knowing what doesn’t work, and eliminating options, will help you arrive at what does work.”
— Sherwick Min Director of Data & Analytics at Epiq Global
Kelly Kohlleffel recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Sherwick Min (EDW Program Director) at Epiq Global, to discuss their recent data breach and current digital transformation efforts. Sherwick discussed how he is driving data and analytics in legal services by leading digital transformation through foundational data governance leveraging a modern approach to data and insights built on Snowflake and Azure.
Kelly: Can you talk for a minute about Epiq Global and what caused you to join the company originally?
Sherwick: Epiq provides data services to the legal industry in which I have never worked, so it was an interesting break from being immersed in SaaS software companies where constant change, digital transformation, and continuous innovation are normal.
Kelly: What’s been going on from a data and platform perspective at Epiq Global in the last year or so?
Sherwick: The legal industry is starting to understand that digitizing their assets and making them available in the cloud will not only help their business by allowing lawyers to catalog, search, and find information (i.e. eDiscovery) but that they can also run their businesses more effectively by leveraging a 360 view of everything. However, security is a big concern, especially to Epiq, because we were victims of a ransomware attack last year. Now we are doing a complete overall from staffing to policy to all touchpoints along the entire information lifecycle, not just security access to data via SSO authentication and row-level authorization but data governance. We care about the quality of the data because our data is our product used by our customers as well as the courts.
Kelly: When we are working with clients to design data products and solutions, we always work towards what we call the 7Ss — simplicity, speed, sustainability, self serve, scale, security, and savings. What’s most important to you when building data products?
Sherwick: For a company rebounding after a data breach, security and speed were at the foremost focus. Simplicity, self-service, sustainability, scale, and savings are always important to the user experience when it comes to offering subscription-based services where customer churn always top of mind.
Kelly: Why did you choose Snowflake as your data platform?
Sherwick: It’s been exciting following Snowflake’s journey over the years. Frankly, their features around data warehouse operations, workloads, visualization, data sharing, and a growing list of partnerships made it the obvious choice for us.
Kelly: How do you look at build vs buy decisions when it comes to the data landscape?
Sherwick: Build vs buy decisions are based on many things including in-house expertise, flexibility, extensibility, and total cost of ownership. We often think of our world as unique demanding customization but oftentimes, we get a different view when we back up a bit to see the patterns
Kelly: How do you balance architectural complexity?
Sherwick: We are at a stage where we must get our hands around our growing tech debt to decide what we should do: we certainly do not want to bring it into the cloud. Adding architectural complexity to represent a complex process is understandable, but adding architectural complexity to support organic growth should raise a red flag.
Kelly: Can you talk about your development cycle for new data products?
For us, the focus how now shifted more so to the customer experience. Honestly, we are trying to completely transform the legal services industry from billable hour products to align with more of a “pay-as-you-go” model like the cloud. Ultimately we are motivated to transform our products from tools to services focused around business capabilities instead of tasks.
Kelly: Do you have any suggestions for mitigating risk and measuring success for net new data products?
Sherwick: Honestly, adopting an agile methodology where the customer is involved in every step is the best way to mitigate risks. Ultimately, we measure the success of our data products through our customer satisfaction and engagement.
Hear More Perspectives from Sherwick
- Transforming people and processes
- Data Silos
- Snowflake’s Data Platform
- eDiscovery
- What it is like to compete in an Iron Man
Listen to the Episode:
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