Being Meghan Brosnahan: Director of E-Discovery Services at Sutter Health

Editor’s note: The author of this post is a fellow at CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics and is a member of the California bar. The post below ties into a series on women who work at the intersection of technology and the law.

By Monica Bay, Fellow, CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics

Timing is everything. In 2013, Meghan Brosnahan had a great job at Teris, a national e-discovery vendor. She joined the company as director of enterprise services in 2011 and was quickly promoted to vice president of professional services, serving the West Coast. “I loved the job and was very proud of our team, our accomplishments and the structure we built,” said Brosnahan.

But the company was sold, and her role became redundant.

[Image “Brosnahan-Meghan” (src=https://bol.bna.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Brosnahan-Meghan-e1442440953931.jpg)]

“The day I was laid off, a former client called me and asked if I might be interested in coming to work for their team. Four months later (and after I turned down two other offers), I was hired to build and standardize e-discovery for Sutter Health , the second largest healthcare provider in Northern California,” said Brosnahan, who earned her J.D. at Cornell Law School.

Her title: director of e-discovery services. Once again, Brosnahan found a perfect fit.

She joined Sutter Health in February 2014 and has a team of six people.

“My title remains the same but my role evolves almost daily,” Brosnahan said. “I work with my team on high risk, high exposure or high complexity matters as needed. When I’m not working on program development or complex matters, most of my time is spent on issues related to the overlap between the Office of General Counsel and information or technical services, information governance, data security and privacy. I draft and review procedures and consult on strategy related to data and legal risk.”

Based in San Francisco and Sacramento, she said her goal for the next year is to “create a comprehensive training program for outside counsel; refine and document our preservation and discovery standards; and broker an all-in pricing model with one preferred legal service provider. This last one has the potential to change the way we approach discovery and that’s exciting! Beyond that my goals are all aimed at efforts to help the organization improve.”

Build Bridges

Over the course of her career, “the most important thing I’ve learned is to watch the people above me and throughout the organization — and learn what I respect and value and identify the actions I don’t want to emulate,” said Brosnahan.

Since college at the University of Texas, where she received her B.A., she has developed “a consistent ability to identify and develop important relationships,” she said. “The most valuable mentoring came from people who were willing to tell me hard truths.”

Brosnahan acknowledges that “internal interactions are very particular, in the details, to a given organization,” and she encourages in-house e-discovery practitioners to work closely with related teams, including IT, information governance, privacy, human resources, investigations, audit, “and, of course, colleagues in the Office of General Counsel who may be able to leverage e-discovery technology to make evidence-based decisions related to M&A, deals, contracts, investigations, governance, etc.”

“We are the masters of powerful technology that is rarely used to full capacity,” she said. “Find ways to evangelize the capability and help your business be better. Offer help and input as you are able to, and learn as much as you can about the work others do. It will help you tremendously if you have to gather data from that group.”

Brosnahan also encourages legal professionals to speak up.

“If you don’t communicate the good work you are doing and the value you bring to the organization then your manager won’t know about it. This isn’t about bragging, it’s about clearly communicating the results of your work using evidence and metrics,” she said. “It’s important for your manager, it’s important for you, and it’s important for your team. As we plow through our days it’s easy to lose sight of how much we’ve accomplished. Remember, it’s a sad dog that doesn’t wag it’s own tail.”