Paul Weiner doesn’t just anticipate the future of law and technology – he helps define it.
As a shareholder and Littler’s National eDiscovery Counsel, he operates at the intersection of law, data, and technology—turning complexity into clarity and transforming eDiscovery into a strategic asset.
As quoted by Chambers: "It's not just about the quantity and quality of the advice, but also the presentation: is this person someone I can put before C-suite executives, particularly for complex matters like eDiscovery. Paul is that person: he's very knowledgeable in his subject matter but can have a conversation with you where you don't feel out of your depth, which is very important given the work he does. He has great strategic thinking."
Paul is the person clients call for their hardest data and technology challenges. He combines technical fluency, litigation experience, and forward-looking insight to deliver solutions that are practical, scalable, and future ready. His north star is simple: win the case. Every discovery decision he makes is designed to drive quickly and persuasively to the merits.
With extensive experience in high exposure and often precedent-setting class actions, FLSA collective actions, and California PAGA matters, Paul brings a pragmatic, cost effective lens to eDiscovery issues that too often derail litigation. Known for distilling complex technical and legal concepts into plain language, he ensures that executives, mediators, and judges alike understand the story the data tells.
At Littler, Paul leads a multidisciplinary team of lawyers, technologists, and data analysts to deliver sophisticated, tech-enabled solutions to clients across the globe—powered by project management excellence, alternative pricing models, and state-of-the-art tools, including AI. He built and manages the Littler Discovery Data Center, which performs electronic evidence processing and hosting, and helped position Littler as a pioneer in Relativity adoption and the first Am Law 100 to fully migrate to Relativity One.
A culture leader within the firm, Paul has served as Chair of the Board of Directors Nominating Committee, Chair of the Governance Committee, Chair of the Client Innovation Advisory Council, and as Associate General Counsel. Alongside Littler’s Managing Director, he co-moderates the flagship general session at Littler’s annual Executive Employer Conference.
For more than a decade, Paul has been recognized globally as one of the top lawyers in eDiscovery, earning Band 1 rankings from Chambers USA and Chambers Global, and repeated recognition by Who’s Who Legal: Litigation (Thought Leader). In 2019, Who’s Who Legal ranked Littler as one of only two “Leading Law Firms” for eDiscovery, and since Chambers began ranking eDiscovery departments, Littler has consistently been among the few recognized.
Paul helps shape the standards that shape the industry. He serves as Co-Chair of the Advisory Board for the Georgetown Law Global Advanced eDiscovery Institute - which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2023, and consistently features more judges steeped in eDiscovery than other programs in the country, on the Working Group Series Leadership Council of The Sedona Conference (following multiple terms on the Steering Committee of WG 1), and is a Fellow of both the American Bar Foundation and the College of Law Practice Management.
Internationally recognized as an authority on eDiscovery, Paul publishes extensively and speaks globally to C-suite executives, judges, and attorneys, demystifying issues arising from worldwide data proliferation, emerging technologies, and evolving legal standards. He is a contributing author to the Electronic Discovery Institute Judges’ Guide to eDiscovery, specifically the chapters “In Employment Cases, eDiscovery is a Two-Way Street” (addressing the often-overlooked discoverability of plaintiff-side ESI) and “Rule 34 Possession, Custody, or Control: A Tale of Three Tests …” (analyzing the circuit split on these issues). He also contributed to the EDRM’s Bench Book on Special Masters and eDiscovery Mediators, and served as Executive Editor of The Sedona Conference’s Commentary on Rules 34 and 45 Possession, Custody or Control, recommending a uniform national standard modeled on the majority “Legal Right” test. His thought-leadership articles have appeared in leading journals and national publications including ABA Journal of Litigation, ABA Employment & Labor Relations Law Newsletter, Law Technology News, Law360, New York Law Journal, and National Law Journal.
Paul has also been appointed as a Special Master in federal and state courts.
Beyond his practice, Paul is deeply engaged in the community. He has served as a board member of Breastcancer.org, and as President and long-time Executive Committee Member of The Temple American Inn of Court, including as Ambassador to the International Inns of Court, where he co-chaired several cross-border programs with Gray’s Inn, London–presented in Philadelphia, London, and virtually during COVID. In 2023, he and the Honorable Cynthia Rufe received the inaugural Honorable Lowell A. Reed, Jr. Distinguished Professionalism Award.
Selected Matters
- Serve as National eDiscovery counsel for U.S. retailer with $50 billion in annual sales and over 4,000 stores, by providing global eDiscovery advice on employment litigation matters and company-wide eDiscovery policies, practices and procedures, and serving as lead eDiscovery counsel for multiple federal and state class, collective actions and California Private Attorney General Act lawsuits pending against the company’s various divisions, alleging claims ranging from alleged unpaid time for Bag/Security Checks, missed statutory meal and rest breaks, failure to provide suitable seating, and off-the-clock work for closing/opening stores, including implementing strategies for avoiding the extreme operational burdens and significant costs associated with nationwide preservation at the outset of class/collective/PAGA actions and streamlining the production of data from structured databases.
- Serve as National eDiscovery Counsel for a $12 billion healthcare system with 60,000 employees, 20 hospitals, hundreds of clinical locations, and a multi-million member health insurance division, providing global eDiscovery advice on litigation matters and company-wide eDiscovery, AI and data governance policies, practices and procedures. In addition to advising on specific litigation cases, Paul’s advice has encompassed the completion of a backup tape remediation project (involving over 10 petabytes of data), updating litigation hold and information governance procedures to account for new technologies, and educating outside counsel on contemporary eDiscovery standards and strategies.
- Directed the discovery strategy for an unprecedented Union organizing campaign by the NLRB leveled at a global retail organization, involving hundreds of Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) Charges, and associated ULP trials, across the country. In a break from 40 years of practice, the NLRB served extensive preservation demands, requests for evidence, and subpoenas seeking ESI in these cases. This aggressive and unprecedented approach to ESI was consistent with other unprecedented positions the NLRB asserted in this portfolio of cases, including advocating to the Board that it overrule Shell Oil Co., Inc., 77 NLRB 1306 (1948), and its progeny” – despite the fact that Shell Oil has been controlling law for over 70 years. Activities included standing up new practices and procedures for preserving, identifying, collecting, culling, searching and producing massive volumes of data in accordance with the accelerated deadlines mandated by Board procedure, and addressing unique burden, proportionality and privilege objections (including unique privileges like Berbeglia) in the labor context. The eDiscovery Team also took a front-line role in trials handling discovery and evidentiary issues, including in one trial that was reported as the largest ULP case in the NLRB’s history. This portfolio of cases also resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ordering lower courts to apply a stringent four-factor test (verses a more lenient standard used by lower courts) when deciding whether to grant NLRB 10(j) petitions for emergency relief.
- Provide global eDiscovery advice on employment litigation matters and company-wide eDiscovery policies, practices and procedures (including eDiscovery training to in-house law department and other outside counsel), to a global, multinational chemical company with approximately 80,000 employees and customers in over 100 countries worldwide.
- Directed all eDiscovery in a lawsuit resulting from an EEOC systemic investigation of individuals who worked at hundreds of distribution centers across the country during a 15-year period, that included: collecting for culling, searching, reviewing and producing email from three systems/email archives; preparation of a privilege log with over 16,000 individual entries; implementing a standard approach for collecting data from hundreds local facilities; and pushing back on custodians and search terms proposed by the EEOC, including documenting burdens of tens of millions of dollars even after post-culling of data.
- In a high-profile portfolio of cases involving government agencies alleging constitutional violations, created strategy for legally searching, reviewing and producing data sought in discovery that was potentially protected from disclosure by the Investigating Grand Jury Act, 42 Pa. Stat. §§ 4541, et al.
- Directed all eDiscovery activities for precedent-setting California-class action that challenged a piece-rate system for compensation with industry-wide implications for the trucking business. The class encompassed over 11,000 current members and covered a 15-year period and activities included extracting, restoring, or collecting over 80 billion database records, 6,000 tables, and 130,000 data fields, and culling, sorting and reviewing that data to limit relevant productions to about 1 billion electronic records, including creating a litigation-specific “Data Dictionary” for the complex IT systems (including decommissioned legacy systems) for use by all parties’ experts. This supported decertifying the class on the eve of trial, as the produced data conclusively proved that individual questions, a lack of common proof, and manageability issues, made continued class treatment unworkable.
In recent trade secrets cases:
- Collecting text and WhatsApp messages from several hundred iOS and Samsung smartphones used by multiple tiers of custodians – including C-suite executives – located across the United States, on a rush basis to comply with expedited, court-ordered deadlines.
- Overcoming sophisticated exfiltration techniques by using forensic analysis of proprietary company systems, M365 logs, smartphones and computers to prove information was stolen using screenshots of trade-secret material pasted into draft personal emails. This matter also required navigating foreign language issues for international customers located in China and other parts of Asia.