Tessa K Jacob

Practice Areas

Tessa leads Husch Blackwell’s cutting edge eDiscovery Solutions team and has spearheaded the firm’s efforts to provide consistent, defensible and repeatable eDiscovery solutions for our clients.

She is responsible for establishing and implementing best practices for eDiscovery as well as providing the related education and training for our attorneys and litigation technology staff.

A practicing attorney for nearly 30 years, Tessa’s strong understanding of the substantive and strategic aspects of litigation informs the counsel she provides to clients and case teams on all aspects of eDiscovery. She works with clients and case teams to create strategic, cost-effective and defensible discovery plans.

Tessa is knowledgeable in both the legal and technical aspects of eDiscovery. She has vast experience in using and assessing the value of using data mining tools, technology assisted review and various review platforms. She provides discovery management to our clients, including legal hold implementation, identification, preservation and collection of client data as well as assessment of risks and costs of specific discovery strategies.

Tessa has served as lead eDiscovery counsel in class action cases and has led eDiscovery efforts for numerous companies that were the target of government investigations by the Department of Justice, Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Her skills in early case assessment, search term development and strategy, and the use of analytics and technology assisted review not only saved clients’ money but helped to ensure early favorable results.

Tessa’s experience in handling eDiscovery in active litigation and her understanding of the legal and technical issues that complicate discovery makes her uniquely qualified to assist clients in creating legal hold processes and ordinary course processes. She has assisted numerous companies of varying sizes in a variety of industries in creating and implementing such plans. Her practical approach focuses on creating a repeatable, defensible process that causes minimum interruption to a company’s daily business.

Tessa serves as Managing Director of the firm’s Litigation Technology department. In this role, she leads the department’s efforts to establish efficient, defensible standards for the collection, processing, searching and production of electronic data in litigation. She assists in the selection of vendors and new technologies for the department.

Tessa routinely speaks and guest lecturers on developments in eDiscovery and provides training presentations to clients on the latest technologies and methodologies in the field. She speaks regularly, both locally and nationally, on eDiscovery. She has presented at the National eDiscovery Leadership Institute at UMKC, the Annual ASU-Arkfeld eDiscovery & Digital Evidence Conference in Tempe, Arizona, and as part of the Masters Conference. Additionally, she serves on the Advisory Committee for the University of Florida eDiscovery Conference. Tessa has also been appointed Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, where she is in her fourth year of teaching an upper-level, semester-long class on eDiscovery.

Additionally, Tessa serves on the firm’s Diversity Council and its Kansas City Hiring Committee.

Professional Memberships

- Georgetown Law eDiscovery Training Institute

- Johnson County Bar Association

- Kansas Bar Association

- The Missouri Bar

- ASU-Arkfeld eDiscovery and Digital Evidence, Advisory Committee

- NeLi, National eDiscovery Leaders Institute, Advisory Board

- University of Florida's eDiscovery Conference, Advisory Board

- The Sedona Conference, Working Group 1 (Electronic Document Retention and Production) Steering Committee, 2022-2025