Dan H Willoughby Jr.

Dan Willoughby joined the firm in 1986 and was elected partner in 1994. Mr. Willoughby is a member of the firm’s E-Discovery Group, and he heads up the firm’s Discovery Center. The Discovery Center is an off-site facility located nearby the firm’s offices in Midtown Atlanta that houses 175 staff and project attorneys, paralegals, project assistants and technical staff. Under Mr. Willoughby’s leadership, the Discovery Center and its predecessor locations have provided cost effective and centralized discovery services to a wide-range of clients over the last decade.

Experience

In addition to his work as a commercial and products liability litigator, Mr. Willoughby has devoted his career to the management of major discovery matters. Mr. Willoughby began his discovery work in 1986 in assisting Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation in collecting and coding millions of pages of documents in preparation for discovery demands in the second wave of the tobacco litigation in the late 1980’s.

Over the ensuing 20 years, Mr. Willoughby has been at the leading edge of developments in discovery technology, adapting the firm’s processes and client offerings as each new technology emerged.

Discovery Center Experience

• Managed a large staff of lawyers, paralegals and clerks in off-site facilities commencing in 1995 which undertook to review 40 million pages of documents in the tobacco litigation, ultimately producing more than seven million indexed and coded pages for two clients.
  
  
• Instrumental in working with emerging e-discovery providers and creating a web-based repository that enabled secure access to produced documents for clients, defense counsel and opposing counsel under the terms of carefully drafted protective orders.
  
  
• National Discovery Counsel to Brown & Williamson, serving all of the client’s discovery needs in all cases across the country. Mr. Willoughby devised processes and teams to provide written discovery databases and centralized services, as well as processes for responding quickly to the defensive needs of trial counsel for pre-trial motions, depositions and trial work.
  
  
• Works closely with privilege log defense teams, crafting defensible logs and then defending them. Mr. Willoughby has drafted responses to numerous motions to compel and has successfully argued those motions as discovery counsel in various cases.
  
  
• Over the last decade, Mr. Willoughby and the Discovery Center have provided centralized discovery services to a diverse array of clients on a diverse array of projects, including Purdue Pharma, The Coca-Cola Company, Shell and numerous others.
  
  
• Lectures in the field of e-Discovery, including instructing on the steps involved in the e-discovery process, best practices derived from years of experience and pitfalls to be avoided. His unique career and 20-plus years of work on major discovery matters has made him one of the most knowledgeable lawyers in the country on the challenges of e-discovery and the vendor resources available to assist in meeting client needs.