Tell Us About A Time You Needed a Combination of Skills to Solve a Problem
Tell us about a time you needed a combination of skills to solve a problem.
As a marketing associate at Giant Aerospace, I’ve learned how to adapt on the fly. At times, the projects I take on stray far away from the category of marketing: I’ve managed coders, mentored an intern, optimized web performance, and even worked on a lawsuit. The lawsuit was a project that especially challenged me to learn and hone my communication and technological skills.
Our company’s legal consultant, Srivistan, approached me looking for assistance on a project. I was interested – I’d taken some Business Law courses in undergrad – but I’d never the opportunity to work on a legal project at Giant Aerospace. Excited to get started, I immersed in all the details of the project, particularly the daunting task of assisting with the Electronic Discovery (eDiscovery) process. eDiscovery is the required task of collecting and preserving all information that could be relevant to a lawsuit, following the nationally defined EDRM model, and exchanging this information with the opposite legal team. The process requires time management, legal strategy, communication, and technological skills, as cases can sometimes involve tens of thousands of documents over several years.
Srivistan and I began learning about the technical process and legal precedents for our claims. We shared resources and collaborated to identify key search terms and important individuals to depose. In order to respond to and draft “interrogatories,” a series of questions each side asks the other to better understand the facts of the case, Srivistan and I discussed our opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of our arguments. As issues arose with technologies we used, I built out and combined my software skills, to assist our team of lawyers in collecting documents.
This project pushed me outside of my realm of expertise as a marketing professional. Though initially I was concerned about my inexperience, over time I became more confident in my ability to adapt to the needs of any project. By learning from my team’s combined decades of experience, I quickly became better equipped to participate in strategic decisions. Additionally, with my business background and visibility during the sales and financial elements of the business, I was able to add useful input to discussions. During initial meetings, I was able to identify new ways of quantifying our damages more accurately, which helped our lawyers achieve a higher settlement. While my advanced computer skills were definitely helpful in progressing the eDiscovery process, ultimately my impact on the project was due to the effective combination of collaboration, communication, and computer skills I brought to the team, enabling Giant Aerospace to reach a multi-million dollar settlement.