Faculty Profile: Barry Willms

Barry D. Willms, CEDS, is director of project management + consulting for the Managed Services Division of Counsel On Call. Under the direction of supervising counsel, he develops the structure under which Counsel On Call attorneys implement cost-conscious, repeatable and defensible discovery review processes, document retention/ESI policies and early case assessment.

Especially of note and because of his work, Counsel On Call has detailed protocols for the predictive coding, TAR and/or key term testing stages that save clients millions of dollars in a defensible, quality-driven manner.

Mr. Willms has more than 19 years of legal experience at Bass, Berry & Sims in Nashville; King & Spalding in Atlanta; and at his own firm in Georgia. At Bass, Berry & Sims, he educated clients on the discovery process and developed policies and reproducible best practices to significantly reduce pre-litigation and discovery costs. In the nearly 10 years he spent at King & Spalding, he supervised and managed large discovery review teams and worked directly with clients on strategic decision making and analysis.

Since 1995, Mr. Willms has developed the following expertise in discovery-related matters:

• Managed large teams of reviewers for more than 100 different matters

• Created and updated record retention policies

• Created and updated litigation hold processes

• Developed reproducible and defensible processes for cost-effective preservation, culling, review, production and privilege logs

• Drafted ESI data maps

• Provided general e-discovery advice

• Conducted interviews to identify key custodians and their ESI

          • Evaluated vendors and their various e-discovery software programs