About Chris McDaniel

Chris McDaniel is the president and CEO of Cognicion LLC.  Chris joined Cognicion as Chief Revenue Officer in 2016 and became CEO in 2018 after 25 years in the litigation support and eDiscovery industry.  When Chris joined Cognicion, he helped continue the strategic initiative of establishing Cognicion as a leader in professional services around eDiscovery, contract lifecycle management and data privacy services.  He is laser-focused on executing the goals of significant growth of the existing client base through strong relationships, excellent levels of client service through sound operations and project management, and developing strategic revenue streams that are adjacent to Cognicion’s core data-centric, problem solving capabilities.

Prior to joining the professional services firm, Chris served a wide range of clients as a strategic consultant with Ibis Consulting, Huron Consulting and Deloitte, helping the newly formed eDiscovery division grown into a $100M business unit.

His expertise includes strategic consulting, sales & marketing for a wide range of corporate legal departments and law firm clients with challenging events including:

• Large civil litigation involving, medical devices, pharma, petroleum/oil & gas, transportation, healthcare and other industries
• DOJ and FTC HSR “Second Requests” (including a 2019 $35B merger of equals)
• FCA investigations
• Data privacy (GDPR, CCPA, PII, HIPAA compliance and program management)
• Cyber security incidents (CID and SEC subpoenas from data breach)

Previous to entering the consulting world, Chris was founder and CEO of GulfStream Digital Solutions, an imaging and reprographic company that he sold to a national competitor after just 3 years.  He also helped two of the leading production software applications, DocuLex and Discovery Cracker, develop and grow into industry standards in the 1990’s and early 2000’s.

Chris graduated from Florida State University with a degree in Communications, and remains committed to the importance of clear and effective communication, after playing baseball at the University of South Florida, Santa Fe CC and in Belgium and Australia.  He is married with three children.