ParfumGigi@aol.com

Corporate Counsel trailblazer makes her mark in electronic data discovery

Sue Reisinger
Corporate Counsel
December 5, 2006

Corporate Counsel has named four trailblazer in-house attorneys for 2006. The first profile in the series is below; the three other profiles will be featured on In-House Counsel in the coming days.

Laura Kibbe, Senior Counsel

Pfizer Inc. New York

It was June 2000, and Laura Kibbe, then an associate at Kaye Scholer's New York office, had to deal with e-discovery for the first time. Her client, Pfizer Inc., had just acquired a company whose diabetes drug had been pulled off the market and was being attacked in civil suits. Kibbe, confronting her first mass tort case, had no formal tech background. She recalls that "the plaintiffs were already into discovery, making requests for e-mail and databases. I had to figure out how to get [that to them] and what to do with it. And I didn't even know the language."

Kibbe, 38, has come a long way from barely knowing a megabyte from an overbite. Seconded to Pfizer for 2004, she worked on the mass tort case as well as other e-discovery demands. The New York-based pharmaceutical giant liked her work so much that it hired her in January 2005 as full-time senior counsel to create the company's own e-discovery system. In the last 22 months, Kibbe has put together the technology and people to form a nationally recognized e-discovery program. It includes her own handpicked discovery response team of lawyers, paralegals and tech experts.

Kibbe is modest about her accomplishments, even though, according to e-discovery consultant George Socha Jr., Pfizer was the first company to hire a lawyer to build such a system from the ground up. (Socha, an attorney who runs Socha Consulting in St. Paul, Minn., has worked with Pfizer as well as the Halliburton Co. and Exxon Mobil Corp. on e-discovery projects.)

Why pay millions for an in-house e-discovery system when, as most companies do, you can outsource the work? Simple -- farming it out to law firms and consultants, all of whom really want the job, can cost even more. Especially when you are an oft-sued drug company like Pfizer. In just one year, Kibbe says, the new system saved "multiple millions of dollars," and served up several side benefits. She gave Pfizer a "repeatable process" that can find and extract information quickly. This process is even more important now, as new rules of federal civil procedure go into effect in December regarding electronic evidence. And Pfizer can "repurpose" recovered data; records collected for, say, regulators can also be used to meet auditors' demands, plaintiffs' subpoenas or even daily business needs.

Pfizer GC Allen Waxman is proud of what Kibbe has accomplished in just under two years. Her response team, Waxman says, has reaped "substantial efficiencies and added effectiveness." But then again, moving fast comes naturally to Kibbe. She grew up in Wolcott, Conn., driving the go-carts and playing around the quarter-midget race cars that her father owns. Nowadays, Kibbe spends her spare time traveling with her two daughters, aged 11 and 4, so they can compete on the national racing circuit for quarter-midget cars -- open wheel race cars built "kid size" for youngsters under age 16.

Kibbe compares her day job to building a three-part pyramid. She spent her first several months at Pfizer creating the most difficult part, the electronic data discovery base. That meant finding and hiring e-savvy lawyers and tech experts, figuring out the company's needs and creating a data recovery process to meet them, finding the right tech tools to implement that process, and then selling the whole package to the Pfizer employees, who would be subject to, for example, new rules on retaining e-mails.

She speedily put together a team that includes two other lawyers, two paralegals, two project managers, one technology manager, a senior operations manager and various administrative assistants. But there were a few bumps along the way. Computer users, from secretaries to lawyers, didn't want to be interrupted as Kibbe's team reconfigured computer settings. So she tried to be as unobtrusive as possible and not disrupt ongoing work, while touting the advantages of how much time and effort the program could save in the long run during litigation. "You just have to really sell it," Kibbe says.

She also learned not to be wowed by, and quickly buy, glitzy technology, especially in the heat of a deadline. "It's too easy to be tempted and fall into technology hell," laughs Kibbe, a confessed shopaholic. She forged close relationships with the tech department, so the techs help her look for solutions rather than question her when she needs something done. Kibbe also relies on them to rein in her attraction to the glitz. "Now I never go anywhere to talk with vendors without [a tech expert] by my side, asking, 'Is that true? Is that possible?'" she says.

With the base of the pyramid in place, Kibbe considers her work now at the middle stage, which means adapting to new technology while tweaking and improving the system. Probably the best thing Kibbe brings to the tech table is the fact that she's a lawyer who has to use the system. That means that she doesn't need to rely on outside firms, who sometimes make promises to produce data that their client can't keep. This way, Kibbe can make sure that what Pfizer tells one court it can or can't do remains consistent in all courts.

As for the future, Kibbe says she is still working to reach the top of the pyramid -- the perfect system. She admits it's elusive, thanks in part to rapid changes in technology. As quickly as someone at Pfizer uses the latest BlackBerry, for example, her team must "figure out a way to get [the data], review it, and when necessary, produce it." But for this amateur race car enthusiast, speed has never been a problem.