Melissa M. Cresson

Melissa Cresson is a partner in the Baton Rouge office of Kean Miller. She joined the firm in 1996 and practices in the electronic discovery, environmental litigation, toxic tort litigation, oil and gas litigation, environmental regulation and commercial litigation areas.

Melissa’s experience in the eDiscovery area includes development of discovery plans in federal and state courts, including a wealth of experience in developing and negotiating of search terms with opposing counsel, and extensive experience in negotiating and implementing same. She also has extensive knowledge and experience in preparing corporate clients for “discovery on discovery” and in implementing and fulfilling obligations pursuant to court-ordered compliance efforts. Melissa has vast experience in assisting corporate clients with custodian identification, supervising and participating in custodian interviews, overseeing forensic collection, managing and designing technology assisted reviews, including predictive coding and continuous active learning (CAL), and implementation and use of the full range of most up-to-date advanced analytical tools in a variety of the most routinely utilized document management and litigation management platforms and eDiscovery tools.

Melissa represents local, national and international energy and industrial clients in numerous mass toxic tort and class action cases, environmental property damage cases, commercial contractual disputes, as well as in substantive environmental areas such as CERCLA/state superfund, RECAP/RBCA (risk-based cleanups), emergency response issues, water issues, underground injection wells, environmental compliance and audits, the defense of state and federal enforcement actions, and regulatory and legislative development. Melissa has developed extensive expertise in management of electronic and large-scale discovery efforts for large, multi-national companies, including advising the clients with regard to same as well as managing, developing, and implementing defensible strategies and processes for preservation, collection, review and analysis, production, and post production of massive amounts of information in the litigation context.