Pamela Fontaine-Peters
Director, Litigation Support and Senior Law Clerk
I am thrilled to be an “official” member of the team at Heuristica Discovery Counsel in my new role of Director of Litigation Support.
I’ve worked in the legal industry for almost 25 years as a law clerk, certified trainer and eDiscovery consultant. Working at Heuristica allows me to use all of my technical skills and draw on my clerking experience. I look forward to meeting the challenges of this exciting position.
I have always loved technology. I was introduced to computers in public school playing a computer card program called Lemonade Stand. I ruled that game! Even at 9 years of age, I knew that computers were going to be a big part of my future. In my early teens, I frequented video arcades racking up high scores on most of the machines. I could play for an hour on one quarter. I was smitten with the electronic world and, like anyone truly enamoured, I wanted more.
Later years found me typing out lengthy programs downloaded from bulletin boards and when that first AOL disk arrived on my doorstep, I dialed up the internet and never looked back. Hundreds (yes, hundreds) of dollars a month were dedicated to exploring the web and making contacts across the connected world.
At my early jobs, I was known as “the computer girl”. My first affidavit of documents using technology utilized DBaseV, a clunky and frustratingly limited program. And yet, the idea that so many documents could be categorized, organized, searched and produced using database technology was captivating.
The industry has moved mountains since then. With electronic document processing, OCR, tiff-conversion, email threading, deduping and analytics, we have the ability to manage HUGE collections of data all from the keyboard of our computer. Programs become more intelligent, increasingly robust and mind-blowingly powerful. What would have taken months then took weeks, days – now hours and minutes. It’s an exciting time to be working with litigation technology and I can think of no better place to do it than at Heuristica Discovery Counsel.
At LegalTech 2017 in New York City, big players in our industry came out to show their products, to entertain and inform, to tantalize with the newest features and functionality. I had mixed feelings about this year’s event. The actual conference was thinner with key players missing in action (or locating their action elsewhere in suites and boardrooms of nearby midtown hotels). Still, I was pleased to connect with Nuix to discuss their solution for processing, investigation, analysis, review, and production. I sought out the KCura booth to share my thoughts on Relativity and discuss the new feature of email thread visualization (available in Relativity 9.5). At a client forum for EDT, I was introduced to the numerous advanced features of their newest version (EDT 6).
I scored some cool swag, ate a $30US breakfast of coffee and croissants (yes, you read that right) and made some new contacts. Overall, I’d say it was a success.
Success is also what we’re building at Heuristica and I’m so pleased to be part of it!
