In 2004, when the firm only comprised a few hundred people globally, an entrepreneurial spirit was key—and that’s what attracted Partner and Managing Director Tarek Ghalayini. In fact, when he joined AlixPartners more than 20 years ago, the business he now leads didn’t yet exist.
“What stood out was the incredible group of talented, scrappy people who were genuinely invested in solving problems in new and interesting ways,” he says. Today, Tarek wears many hats, including co-lead of the Risk Advisory business for the Americas, and global lead for the eDiscovery business—the very area he helped create.
It was that entrepreneurial spirit that allowed Tarek to mature along with the company that he, in turn, was helping evolve and grow. Tarek had been with AlixPartners for about three years when, motivated by a desire to deepen his understanding of litigation and disputes inherent in restructuring work, he decided a law degree made sense as his next move. He enrolled in The George Washington University Law School when AlixPartners’ D.C. office launched.
“We didn’t even have office space at first—just seven or eight of us in a temporary spot,” he recalls. “We brought in some great partners, and that was the beginning of what is now a business with more than 100 people. It’s been a fun ride.”
Tarek’s multidisciplinary expertise positioned him to become instrumental in the creation of AlixPartners’ eDiscovery practice. Finance and law aren’t exactly “known for being tech-forward,” he explains, but his passion isn’t so much for technology itself as it is for innovation.
“What got me into this field was the challenge of taking technology and designing new solutions for old problems,” he says. “The genesis of eDiscovery was really about moving from warehouses full of paper to digital processes—finding ways to do things better, faster, and more reliably. That drive for innovation and creative problem-solving is why I love this space.”
That drive is also what keeps eDiscovery at the forefront of AlixPartners’ offerings, and ensures its ongoing evolution, including the recent launch of Lumen Chat, a visually appealing, easy-to-use platform for reviewing short-form messages.
Tarek shares that Lumen Chat was born, as most things are, out of necessity. As investigations, compliance issues, and inquiries from regulators like the SEC or CFTC evolved, the industry saw a major shift in data transmission—from traditional email, Word documents, and Excel files stored on servers to the widespread use of mobile phones for communication.
“The challenge became: how do we capture this mobile data efficiently and review it without leaving a bunch of orphan data on the sidelines?” he says. “How do we take this concept that we had on the back of a sketch pad and turn it into a robust platform?”
The solution required more than just thinking technically. “Building it required close collaboration between our eDiscovery team, IT, security, development, marketing, and legal,” Tarek says. “There’s no way we could have done it without everyone pulling in the same direction.”
Tarek credits AlixPartners’ highly collaborative culture for making this kind of teamwork possible. As a leader, he prioritizes fostering this culture and supporting his team in addressing the hard questions—and “never being afraid to tear up the playbook and design something new.”
“The most successful people across AlixPartners share a genuine intellectual curiosity about what we do and how we can do it better,” he says. “Everything else stems from that. We also have a group with an incredible work ethic and a commitment to seeing things through, whether it’s a new idea, a deliverable, or a case. But it all starts with asking, ‘How can we do this better?’”