From sports field, to leader in his field, law graduate wins prestigious award in New York!

SCU School of Law & Justice, Class of 2008 Bachelor of Legal and Justice Studies, 1999–2003 Bachelor or Laws (LLB), 2005–2008

New York, centre stage, accepting the 2020 Futurist Award for excellence in eDiscovery, legal operations, and litigation response, is a far cry from where School of Law and Justice (SLJ) Alumnus Paul Armbruster was as a teen, leaving high school at 16, more interested in chasing soccer balls.

In February 2020, Mr Armbruster was honoured by his peers as a leader in his field at the 2020 Corporate eDiscovery Hero Awards — an annual night of celebration, awards, food, and drinks that brings together some of the industry’s best and brightest.

“I was extremely surprised to win the award. The voting was conducted by 40 industry leaders and it was nice to be recognised by many of the people that had mentored me throughout my career. This event gave awards in five categories including a lifetime achievement award to Ken Withers of the Sedona Conference and featured a down-to-earth discussion with featured guest, 60 Minutes correspondent, Lesley Stahl,” he said.

For the past four years Mr Armbruster has been at Salt River Project (SRP) in Phoenix, US, where he works on end-to-end Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) issues.

As well as being admitted to practice law in Australia, Mr Armbruster holds an in-house counsel certificate with the Arizona State Bar.

“I received the award in recognition for over 20 years of contribution to the eDiscovery industry. I have worked both to promote eDiscovery as an essential and recognised function of litigation, as well as to bring those best practices to corporations, law firms, and eDiscovery vendors.

“SRP is a community-based not-for-profit water and energy company, which provides reliable, affordable water and power to more than two million people living in central Arizona”, he said

I have spent significant time managing complex e-discovery issues at law firms, large multinational corporations, and as a litigation and trial consultant — having supported dozens of jury trials throughout the United States (US),” he said.

The technology landscape is changing so fast and keeping pace with emerging chat apps, software platforms, and productivity tools can feel like a losing battle. Mr Armbruster explains that eDiscovery is simply a concept that each party to litigation has a right to see the other side’s evidence.

“If you are in federal court discovery rules are contained within rules 26–37 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). Each state has enacted state law equivalent discovery rules that map to the federal rules, for example, discovery sanctions is FRCP rule 37 and the state rule for discovery sanctions will also be state rule 37. eDiscovery, or electronic discovery, began as a creature of the US legal system and more and more we are seeing other countries, like Australia, embracing technologies and workflows developed years ago in the US,” he said.

“When I began at SRP they didn’t have an eDiscovery program and after conducting an assessment of their current practices it was obvious they needed consistent processes and procedures. We then went about creating a process and procedure playbook that outlines different scenarios and the steps that needed to be taken to get consistent results. We documented, among other things, how to collect text messages from cell phones; how to locate and preserve social media activity; how to search and extract email from various email platforms,” he said.

“Gone are the days when we kept everything forever. The ease of access and identification means that content can often create enormous risk to a company. There are only three reasons to keep business content; first, the content has business value, second, there is a legal obligation to preserve content – say for pending litigation, and third, there is a regulatory obligation – seven years for financial documents. Everything else creates risk and increases cost,” he said.

“When I arrived at SRP they were not deleting certain content from an email archive system and this created enormous risk. Legal and IT partnered to reconfigure rules within their system that enabled us to identify content we needed to preserve, which allowed us to delete the remainder – 25 million emails.”

Prior to working at SRP, Mr Armbruster spent time at Epiq Global, eBay/PayPal, Cooley’s Palo Alto office, and Heller Ehrman in San Francisco. It hasn’t always been glitiz and glamour for Mr Armbruster, who said that as a 16 year old, the appeal of being paid to play sport was far more enticing than high school.

“During high school I was more interested in chasing soccer and cricket balls than school. I took a public service entrance exam at the end of year 10 and was offered a plumbing apprenticeship with the public works department. I thought I had won the lottery, someone was going to pay me $300 a week not to go to school, it was a no-brainer. I may actually be the only licensed plumber and licensed lawyer in Australia.”

After finishing his plumbing apprenticeship Mr Armbruster’s moved to London and this changed his trajectory towards law.

“I got a job as a store detective at the UK equivalent of a Kmart. Before I started, I was required to take a basic criminal law class and I loved it. In the matter of a few months I had gone from changing out toilets to arresting people for shoplifting,” he said.

“When I came back to Australia I wanted to join the Police Force but as I hadn’t finished year 12, they wouldn’t accept me. I had done some research on courses at Southern Cross University and decided to apply for the Associate Degree and I was lucky enough to be accepted. From there I completed the Bachelor of Legal and Justice Studies, the Bachelor of Laws, and completed my PLT.”

Due to the technical nature of his work Mr Armbruster said COVID-19 has had very little impact in his industry.

“eDiscovery lawyers have been using many of the tools required to work remotely for years. We have however, noticed a downturn in the amount of litigation and claims being filed and this is likely the result of less people out and about.”

Mr Armbruster is currently living in Pheonix, Arizona, and hopes to return to his homeland Australia, in the near future.

Story by Kim King.

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