TLS Project Manager Spotlight: From Economics to E-Discovery

Meet Rajuan Pasha, a TLS Director with over 10 years’ experience in e-discovery. TLS London and Dubai’s Director of Business Development Mike Deeker, sat down with him to learn more about how he got into the world of legal technology, his insight into e-discovery, and his predictions for the future of the industry.

How did you get into e-discovery?

Well, I studied economics at university. The 2008 crash happened straight after graduating, so there were no finance jobs going at the time.

I decided to take a different approach, and a friend of mine introduced me to the world of e-discovery. I was always interested in IT and technology, so it was easy to find my feet in the industry. I’ve not looked back since.

What’s your background, and how has e-discovery evolved?

I’ve been in e-discovery for over 10 years now.

I remember at the start of my career a lot of focus was on hard copy documents. Scanning and coding was at the forefront of all exercises. A lot of the companies you see today started as scanning shops. Concordance was the most widely used platform by law firms and in-house legal teams. As you know, that’s been replaced by Relativity, which is the market leader and the platform TLS hosts on.

When I first started, analytics were not really used and they weren’t built into the platforms like they are now. Analytics has definitely been the biggest growth area during my time.

So what attracted you to TLS?

It was hard to not be attracted to TLS! TLS is a growing company and on track for $1 billion in revenue this year, which is amazing. The way the company is structured is very innovative. And the way it’s run and its future plans are all very exciting.

The team here are great. Having so many offices around the world means I’m able to learn and grow personally and professionally. It’s even more so now thanks to the advances in video calling!

Touching again on growth, as TLS grows (and we have some big plans for the next couple of years) I’m able to develop and grow alongside and within the company. There isn’t a ceiling to my (and my team’s) success, and I’m constantly learning from global leaders in the industry. This really does set TLS apart from its peers.

You’re known as the analytics guru at TLS – could you provide some more info on that?

Well, I’ve spent a lot of time working on matters where predictive coding was used in the past. This was six to seven years ago, and there have been some interesting judgements since.

However, this has moved on a lot. Brainspace has taken a new approach to analytics with TAR 2.0. TLS are using this on almost all our current matters, as it’s such a versatile tool, which saves huge amounts of time and costs on data heavy matters.

The most exciting part of analytics is finding documents/trends in the data that you wouldn’t easily find through standard linear review of documents. This is why it’s becoming even more important to use on most (if not all) matters regardless of the data size.

What does your practice mostly cover?

I oversee a lot of our litigation matters and investigations in a number of different jurisdictions. However, the majority of my work is arbitration.

As I do a lot of Middle East work, the main form of dispute resolution there is arbitration, so I’ve carved out a niche when building workflows for arbitration, especially when it comes to responding to Redfern Schedules.

What cases do you prefer to manage?

The arbitrations and investigations are more interesting as you can bring something to the table. You can create workflows, algorithms, etc., to help speed up reviews and find the ‘needle in the haystack.’

This is a lot more different and flexible than working to litigation procedures and following the likes of the DRD and disclosure pilot protocols. For the arbitration and investigation matters, you can be a lot more creative and innovative.

That’s super interesting. So what are your thoughts on the disclosure pilot? Do you think it will succeed?

With data continuously growing, having structure in e-discovery is vitally important. Not only for ease of discovery, but also to manage costs and maintain proportionality in the exercise.

I think the disclosure pilot is an excellent idea and the structure implemented will encourage organisations to engage with e-discovery processes in the right way and on a level playing field.

Of course, as e-discovery practitioners, we want as much of a free hand as possible when implementing processes and workflows. However, in the end, it will also stop us from getting ahead of ourselves and implementing workflows that are not sustainable.

Away from the joys of e-discovery, what do you do in your free time?

I like to travel a lot. Of course, COVID put a huge dampener on that for the last year and a half, but I’m really happy that things are now opening up. Whether it is a family trip, friends trip or solo trip, I’m equally excited!

I am also into sports, particularly playing football (huge Liverpool FC fan) and badminton. I am also a watch nerd and really enjoy high horology!

And finally, what’s the most interesting case/matter you’ve been involved in to date?

Funnily, the most interesting case I have ever worked on is a criminal case. The case involved a lot of moving parts and there were many challenges.

Our client had already carried out a year’s worth of review work outside of any review platform through multiple Excel schedules and we had to preserve this work on Relativity. We had around 120,000 chat messages from various chatting tools, many different data sources and loads of new collections to make.

With it being a private prosecution, the client was extremely cost conscious so managing our time and technology costs was important. All of these challenges combined made the project really interesting and satisfying to see out.

To learn more about TLS, visit www.transperfectlegal.com/.