Published on Sep 16, 2024 We recently spoke with Chris Cantwell, Senior Managing Director, Client Services, about Innovative Driven (ID) University. Launched in early 2024, ID University is more than just an internal training program – it’s a knowledge-sharing endeavor to help employees expand their expertise, foster collaboration, and build stronger client relationships.
This article is a shortened version of the discussion. You can also listen to the audio version below.
ID University started in early 2024 when we hired a Relativity Master who was a teacher earlier in this career. His passion for teaching allowed us to do what we had wanted to do for a long, long time – a formalized program where we train junior members or people who are extraordinarily good in Relativity but haven’t had the opportunity to get the RCA or whatever certification they want.
Why do certifications matter to the team and the company culture?
Investing in people is a natural extension of practicing what we preach. As project managers, we’re technicians and we’re consultants. Those certifications validate us and our company and showcase our expertise, and that’s what we want to do.
If we take Relativity, for example, clients hire us to be experts, consultants, and system administrators. So, we really need to know Relativity inside and out. Those certifications and the university, as we’ve started, culminate with a Relativity Review Pro certificate. That’s the goal. Every new cert we get on our team and our department is showcased by Ken Baldesi, Senior Vice President of Client Services, and the entire leadership team. And that makes us very proud.
The time and effort you invest in people—I feel like it’s unique. And our teammates are excited. We initially started with two students, and it grew to five, and we have more clamoring to get in. We have ideas for the 201-level course, an eDiscovery course, and all kinds of different courses. We have big plans for ID University.
I’ve been with ID for almost ten years. We’re a process improvement company, but we’re also a people improvement company. Clients and employees admire that. We’re not just supporting our clients. We’re also supporting our teammates, team members, and internal growth.
Clients will absolutely be included. That’s the goal. We want to build courses, training modules, and training videos that we can send to our clients. Then, we want to engage them in lunch and learns, and ideally, proper courses people can sign up for.
We have a clear curriculum for these courses. It’s not pretend school. There are assignments, quizzes, and exam prep. You can’t fake something like this. This is human development and nothing to fool around about. These are some demanding certifications.
We take educating our teammates and clients very seriously. It makes everyone better, and it makes our projects run smoother. You can see the members who had less experience in Relativity now diving in on more complex tasks. And you can see someone who previously may have been afraid of any certification or afraid to do this in Relativity is now doing it, without any assistance, and handling those requests. You can see the members who had less experience in Relativity now diving in on more complex tasks.
We want to do eDiscovery 101, focusing on what eDiscovery is, how you define it, what processing engines mean, how you operate within processing engines, etc. Many of our PMs came from the law firm side. So, we want to talk about law firm life. What is that like for someone who has yet to be at the law firm? We want to discuss many different topics.
Naturally, this diversity in topics also elevates people’s diversity, backgrounds, and where they come from professionally. The industry can seem homogenous, making it challenging to adopt a different mindset. We see ID University allowing people from various backgrounds to expand their knowledge and think of creative workflows and processes that can’t come if you only know one method and one workflow.
We don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves in any way. When we have someone who has worked in the IT field, for example, they can write scripts, code, and they understand SQL. We see that as an advantage to ask how we can use that person to improve the team, while maintaining and continuing to grow their skills.
Obviously, we always look for and hire for a core set of skills. But we also look for interesting people, and each one comes with a very different background and a different set of skills. And we do a great job of embracing them.
I think the point is not just internal training, but our idea and goal is really to reach our clients and share the knowledge, our workflow, and anything and everything that we’ve learned. It’s not an “I’m not going to share this with you because you’re a client, or you could go to a competitor” type of thinking. No, we want to share. We always want to be an extension of our case teams and our clients, and work in collaboration with them. If someone understands Relativity as well as our Relativity master, then our databases will look clean, and everything will run smoothly.
When we show our expertise as consultants, we build that trust and can effectively service our clients and manage our matters in the most cost-effective and efficient way.
