Eric Derk

Based in Philadelphia, Eric is a Managing Director in BDO’s Forensic practice. He has 20 years of technical legal project management experience within the legal industry specializing in legal operations, information governance, law department operations, artificial intelligence, data carve out / M&A projects, electronic discovery, litigation support, information governance (IG), matter management, records management, and data remediation. Eric has worked for legal departments and law firms overseeing hundreds of projects, creating comprehensive law department operating frameworks, eDiscovery, AI, and IG strategies, as well as writing implementation roadmaps for the Department of Justice, the CFPB, and more than 45 commercial clients.

His commercial experience includes working with Fortune 100 companies to develop cost/benefit forecast models, which companies leverage to plan and execute strategic implementations of transformation initiatives for information governance teams. Eric's diverse Legal Operations and IG experience has provided him with a broad understanding of the various challenges legal teams face today. He has developed and implemented strategic legal process and technology roadmaps that have resulted in enhanced cost and value approaches across many types of Information Governance initiatives.

Eric assists information governance teams in designing and implementing strategies to support appropriate structure, teams, processes, and technologies. A significant portion of the projects he has led have focused on IG operating models, emphasizing possible strategies, vision, team structure, and sourcing models, as well as supporting processes and tools. Integral to these efforts is benchmarking insights that enable IG teams to identify opportunities for insourcing, co-sourcing, and outsourcing certain tasks based on risk, cost, and associated efforts.

Eric has extensive experience mapping information management and governance processes and building in technical workflows to support the development of metrics that provide insights on capacity and demand, helping to enable the right work to be allocated to the right teams at the right time and for the most appropriate effort and/or fees. His knowledge of artificial intelligence has further enhanced these processes, allowing for more sophisticated data analysis and predictive modeling to optimize legal operations and information governance strategies.

Eric has used various IG tools and platforms in the context of data carve-outs, mapping, and integrations. His work focuses on developing a content taxonomy, reviewing compliance and legal data, and using market tools to identify, remediate, and categorize content based on rules and routines. With the integration of AI technologies, Eric has been able to automate complex data categorization tasks, improve compliance monitoring, and enhance the accuracy of legal data analytics, helping to provide clients with deeper insights and more efficient solutions.