Eric Kolbeck, Minnesota Attorney General’s Office

Attorneys are stereotypically not into technology. Eric Kolbeck knows this, but he’s into busting that myth and using all the technology he can to help him and his colleagues in the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office.

Kolbeck started down the rabbit hole of technology and digital forensics as an undergrad at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. After college and graduate school at Saint Xavier University in Chicago his work at a boutique digital forensics firm taught him about looking beyond the screen and about trade secret theft.

Kolbeck joined the attorney general’s office in 2015 as a litigation liaison and was promoted to an assistant attorney general after graduating from Mitchell Hamline School of Law in 2020, right as the COVID-19 pandemic was happening.

“The pandemic forced us to modernize at light speed,” said Kolbeck, now the manager of the Litigation Support Services & Records Management Division. “I can still recall working 12 to 16-hour days to migrate from an on-premise email system to the cloud over a few short days. This migration had been in the works for months but in just a few short days, our staff had access to chat and could access their tools from mobile devices.”

Kolbeck continues working to improve the access the attorney general’s office has to technology and research tools, always looking to be on the leading edge despite having fewer resources than private firms.

The shift has continued in the last five years. Kolbeck and his team are building a new system to manage cases and collaborate for the attorneys and support staff in the office.

“In the not-too-distant past, a document dump of 100,000 documents would have been overwhelming,” he said. “With our advancements in technology, 100,000 documents for one case are the smaller size of what my team handles every week. The next frontier is artificial intelligence which we have already begun to explore.

“I want to continue to support my colleagues by ensuring they have modern technology worthy of practicing law in a 21st century public law office.”