Lecturer Bios
Patrick Oot, Esq.
Patrick is a partner at Shook Hardy & Bacon's General Litigation and Business Services Division where he leads the practice on e-compliance and digital investigations. He is one of the few e-discovery and compliance attorneys in the nation that possesses the tripartite experience of an in-house corporate counsel from a Fortune 16 organization; a senior attorney at a federal regulatory agency; and a partner in a large law firm.
Patrick has extensive experience advising on discovery and investigative matters involving commercial litigation, compliance, regulatory requests, antitrust matters, and personnel issues. Combined with a deep understanding of forensics and enterprise technology platforms, Patrick’s experience advising clients on responding to federal agency requests under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) is balanced by his broad-based skill in negotiating enterprise software license agreements for collaboration platforms, e-discovery software and enterprise level computer forensic tools.
Before joining Shook, Hardy & Bacon, Patrick served as senior special counsel for electronic discovery in the Office of the General Counsel at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). During his tenure at SEC, Patrick co-chaired the agency’s cross-divisional Electronic Discovery Action Team and co-authored The SEC Electronic Discovery and Litigation Response Manual. He counseled SEC senior leadership and agency staff on best practices and guidance for discovery and litigation strategy and privilege protections and on strategically significant matters involving forensics, technology and ECPA interpretation for subpoena enforcement.
Patrick appeared twice as SEC’s 30(b)(6) deponent to defend the agency’s discovery practices with favorable outcomes to the agency. He successfully designed and implemented SEC’s preservation process as well as a federal government-wide educational program that includes participation of the federal judiciary.
Prior to serving at SEC, Patrick was an experienced in-house counsel leading Verizon’s electronic discovery practice as Director of Electronic Discovery and Senior Litigation Counsel. Patrick was one of the nation’s first in-house attorneys charged to create and deploy defensible policies, guidelines and procedures for litigation response.
While at Verizon, Patrick testified as the company’s Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 30(b)(6) witness, defending the same policies and guidelines that he helped design and implement. In 2006, he was nominated for the Verizon Excellence Award after playing a key role in the successful completion of Verizon’s response to the Department of Justice’s Second Request for Documents in its acquisition of MCI. As a result of his work, Inside Counsel magazine named Verizon’s e-discovery team as one of the ten most innovative legal groups of 2007, the group’s second year winning the title.
In 2007, Patrick appeared with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer at Georgetown University Law Center’s Summit on Electronic Discovery. He has testified before the U.S. Judicial Conference’s Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Evidence where he presented his position on Proposed Rule of Evidence 502. The committee included in its draft to the Judicial Conference language incorporating his suggestions.
Outside of work, Patrick volunteers his time as a co-founder at The Electronic Discovery Institute, a non-profit organization that conducts studies of litigation processes for the benefit of the federal and state judiciary.
Patrick lectures regularly at educational events and legal conferences internationally. He has appeared on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and was interviewed for the August 2008 edition of The Economist.
Edwin Lee, Esq.
Ed Lee is a Managing Director with Alvarez & Marsal Global Forensic and Dispute Services in Houston and San Francisco, specializing in electronic discovery and computer forensics in support of complex litigation, internal, and regulatory investigations.
With more than 17 years of legal, technical and business experience, he has helped legal counsel and companies control the costs and mitigate the risks associated with multiple facets of the discovery process, both reactively in the midst of litigation and proactively through design of effective data management and legal processes.
He has worked with clients across various industries, including energy and resources (upstream, mid-stream and downstream oil and gas), medical device manufacturing, financial services and technology.
His primary areas of concentration: litigation readiness, helping to reduce the risks and manage the costs of discovery through careful preparation and process improvement, with services including e-discovery preparedness, records and information management, legal hold management, discovery technology assessment and legacy data remediation; and collection, assisting clients with effectively identifying and collecting data and documents to meet discovery demands.
Mr. Lee is also involved with data analytics and processing, helping clients securely reduce collected data to a manageable set for review; and providing clients and their legal counsel with a secure, online collaborative environment for hosting of documents and data for legal review. He offers efficient and timely assistance with document review and production in business disputes and investigations, as well as the accurate, on-time production of data in multiple formats.
Notable assignments include design and execution of discovery processes for major multi-district environmental litigation, execution of global fraud and corruption investigations, and development of internal policies for records management and legal hold.
Before A&M, Mr. Lee worked with Deloitte Financial Advisory Services in Houston for more than three years, most recently serving as a senior manager in their analytic and forensic technologies practice, focusing on complex litigation support and discovery advisory services.
Earlier, he spent eight years working with a technology integration services company, serving as practice director for enterprise content management solutions, including legal hold, archival and records management technologies.
Mr. Lee earned a juris doctorate degree from The University of Houston Law Center and bachelor's degree in history from the University of Houston. He is a member of the State Bar of Texas and participates in The Sedona Conference Working Group 1 on Electronic Document Retention and Production.
Erin Pope, Esq.
Erin Pope is Chief Privacy Officer and Assistant General Counsel, Golden Living.
