Kirkland & Ellis Partner: Slow-Evolving Case Law Is a Major E-Discovery Challenge
Vanessa Barsanti was honored with a Monica Bay Women of Legal Tech Award as part of the 2025 Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards. In this Q&A, she discusses the biggest challenges from the past year and the importance of legal innovation.
The 2025 Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards honor those who have made significant contributions to legal innovation from law firms, corporate legal departments and legal tech providers.
While many awards recognize the contributions legal professionals or organizations made over the past year, our new Monica Bay Women of Legal Tech Award honors women at law firms, legal departments, and legal technology or legal service companies who have achieved notable successes and made significant contributions to legal innovation over the course of their careers.
The award is named after the former editor-in-chief of Legaltech News. Bay, a pioneer in the space who fostered an entire generation of legal tech professionals, was dedicated to recognizing and empowering women across the industry.
Kirkland & Ellis partner and leader of the Firm’s e-discovery team Vanessa Barsanti was one of the winners of this year’s Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law, Monica Bay Women of Legal Tech Award.
Looking back at the past year, what were the biggest challenges you faced, and how did you overcome them?
We are still waiting for the case law to address much of the emerging technology. There’s a natural lag in e-discovery regarding this technology given that litigations are generally backwards looking, often by years. Accordingly, courts have not been afforded much opportunity to weigh in on the expectations for emerging technology yet. This leaves litigants without clear guidance in certain scenarios about what may be considered reasonable, proportional, or otherwise required under the rules. As data grows every year, clients are naturally excited about the prospect of what efficiencies new technology can offer. Finding ways to match those emerging technologies with our client’s excitement has been an interesting challenge, full of great opportunities to partner with each other and learn new things
Looking at the legal industry as a whole, what does “legal innovation” mean to you?
It’s an old adage that failure is a necessary precursor to success, and legal innovation is no exception to that. The number of new tools that are being created in the e-discovery world right now sometimes feels endless, and so a lot of experimentation can be required to find the right blend of use case, data, and tool. We can’t be afraid to not get it right the first time or we’ll never move forward and evolve as an industry. It’s just a matter of choosing an appropriate scenario for that testing that will allow growth without significant risk.
Legal tech is only growing in scale and importance. What is it about working in the tech world that you enjoy?
I have often compared e-discovery to logic games. For those who did not have to take the LSAT, those are unique puzzles where you are given all the information you need to answer the question with certainty, but you must work through that information to come to the answer. While acquiring the information takes more work than reading an LSAT problem, the concept of puzzling it all out and what it means for a case and client feels similar. Because one of my biggest strengths is resourcefulness, working in e-discovery allows me to play to that strength and put it to use every day by finding and putting together the pieces of the puzzle. I rarely meet an issue for which I, along with my incredible team, can’t create possible solutions.
