This post was originally published on High Performance Counsel and has been republished here with permission.
David Greetham, Vice President of eDiscovery at Ricoh USA, is an investigator at heart and invests time into learning about the business challenge's facing our industry. He shares his professional journey and advice for an evolving industry in the latest High Performance Counsel "Baker's Dozen" Interview.
TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOURSELF AND HOW YOU CAME TO BE IN (OR A CUSTOMER OF) THE LEGAL BUSINESS SERVICES FIELD?
I started my career working in catering in the south of France, and eventually ended up in hotel management where I was responsible for the financial aspects of running a high end kitchen, which included menu planning. It was there that I discovered a “real appetite” for using computers to solve complex problems. Our graphing program of choice was LOTUS 1-2-3 with its revolutionary WYSIWYG editor. I ended up becoming highly proficient in the program and started training my peers how to use it. This was the start of the journey that ultimately led me to starting my own IT support company in the UK a few years later.
A short time after, my company won a significant contract with the local law enforcement and they got their first criminal matter involving computers. Computer forensics didn’t exist at that time, so as the resident technology experts it fell to us to help them build their case. We really were pioneers of the industry.
In the over 25+ years since then, I moved from the UK to the US, built and sold my company HSSK Forensics to Ricoh, and have had the privilege of providing expert testimony in some of the largest cases in the world, remaining focused on the ever-evolving field of computer forensics and eDiscovery.
WHAT DO YOU DO FOR A LIVING RIGHT NOW?
I am the Vice President of eDiscovery at Ricoh USA, Inc., where I am responsible for our Intelligent eDiscovery services. While my focus is now on the strategy and growth of this area of the business, I remain a Licensed Private Investigator in the States of Texas and Florida, a member of the High Technology Crime Network (HTCN), a Certified Fraud Examiners (CFE), and am a Certified Forensics Litigation Consultant (CFLC). I continue to be active in eDiscovery and Computer Forensics matters.
WHAT HAS BEEN YOUR GREATEST TRIUMPH AND YOUR GREATEST SUCCESS IN THE LEGAL SERVICES FIELD AND WHAT DID YOU LEARN FROM EACH?
In 2008, I developed Remlox™, a forensically sound remote ESI collection tool that was eventually patented by Ricoh. It was named by several courts as the tool required for ESI collection, and has now been deployed over 7,000 times in 37 countries.
I believe that Remlox™ fundamentally changed how ESI is collected. At the time, remote collections were frowned upon, leaving onsite work as the only real option which required expensive short notice travel by computer forensic experts. Remlox™ changed that. Now, we could run forensic data collections remotely making it faster, logistically easier and far less expensive, while still achieving the same result.
The pinnacle of this experience was winning Ricoh’s Star Patent award in Tokyo, which at the time, I didn’t fully comprehend the significance of. Ricoh has over 50,000 patents, and this award is given out to the top patent of the year. Not only is receiving the award a great honor, I also learned that it had never been awarded to anyone outside of Japan in Ricoh’s 80+ year history. The entire experience was exceptionally humbling.
Looking back, I learned that if you can think outside of the box to uncover solutions that address future challenges, the impact may be even more significant that you ever dreamed.
