Leadership Team

     Our core team is unparalleled in the industry in their depth of knowledge and expertise. They’re committed to Cricket because they believe in what Cricket delivers. The members of the Cricket Technologies team strive for excellence in delivering the best solutions and creating cost-effective, efficient approaches for finding and managing the information you need.

     Click on a team member’s name to learn more about what experience they bring to solve your problems.

Lt. General Arthur C. Blades USMC (Ret.), President
     Art Blades is a veteran senior manager, having served as a three-star General in the Marine Corps and President of two companies providing document management technology services to government agencies, corporate legal departments, and law firms. Art served two combat tours and seven operational commands in the Marines, where he specialized in operational planning. Art has a B.S. from Villanova and a Masters in Business Administration from Pepperdine University. He co-founded Cricket in 2001.

Kara Hayduk, VP Project Management and Production

     Kara Hayduk Barnes has more than twelve years of experience managing complex litigation support projects. Kara is Cricket's senior expert on e-Discovery, having directly managed over 600 successful projects. In her role as VP Project Management and Production, Kara leads the Project Management team as well as all Production departments and staff.

     Drawing on her experience managing Cricket's largest cases, Kara has built an organization with a near-perfect record of on-time, accurate deliverables, and is widely recognized within the industry as one of the preeminent experts on e-discovery strategies and technologies. She has expert level knowledge on all topics related to e-discovery including project planning and execution, budgeting, review tools, production approaches, and is an exceptional communicator across a broad spectrum of project roles from corporate GCs, to attorneys to litigation support staff and paralegals. Kara has led hundreds of cases involving patent, construction, employment, class-action, general corporate, healthcare, real estate and many others types of litigation.

     After graduating from Pennsylvania State University with a degree in Quantitative Business Analysis, Kara served in various project management functions with Aspen Systems for six years. She then served as a Project Manager for the Director of National Litigation Support Operations for Uniscribe. Before joining Cricket in 2002, Kara was a Senior Project Manager for Litigation Systems, Inc., where she managed multiple major environmental, insurance, patent, and asbestos litigation support projects.

Brian Curtiss, VP Client Services
     Brian Curtiss manages the Client Services team, The Client Services team crafts case-specific solutions for complex e-discovery challenges and is the primary driver of successful client engagements, new client acquisition, solutions consulting and relationship building.  Mr. Curtiss has been with Cricket for five and a half years helping clients create defensible and cost-efficient e-discovery plans that are crafted in response to the specific needs of each case.  Mr. Curtiss works with clients to:

• Create an inventory of sources of potentially relevant Electronically Stored Information (ESI)

• Identify the types and forms of ESI and analyze the impact that has on planning and strategy

• Ensure proper data preservation and harvesting

• Create an audit trail and preserve chain of custody

• Identify and document the methods of processing and production

• Identify appropriate technologies to achieve strategic objectives

• Determine ways to reduce costs and streamline process

• Define schedule and total costs up front

• Prepare the team for the meet-and-confer

• Expert witness

     Drawing on current industry best practices and lessons learned during his 2 1/2 years managing the WorldCom government investigation (currently the 2nd largest litigation on record behind Enron), Mr. Curtiss tailors the e-discovery plan to meet specific case goals and objectives, while also keeping an eye on reducing bottom line costs through economical workflow and innovative uses of technologies. Brian has been managing large-scale projects for more than 16 years, and has been with Cricket since 2002.

Mike McHugh, Assistant Director of Production
     Michael McHugh has been with Cricket since early 2006. Michael has been in techical sales and production for over eleven years and is responsible for managing the Cricket Discovery Suite Production Center as well as providing technical sales support and training. Michael specializes not only in sales, but in managing large, complex projects and problem solving. Michael coordinates Cricket production with Cricket's in-house development team to provide industry leading technology for e-discovery processing. Michael combines sales and project management to provide quality customer service for all of his clients. From 2001 to 2005, Michael ran his own company providing digital printing and technology services to major corporations.

Sarah Kittner, Mid-Atlantic Regional Sales Manager

     Sarah Kittner began her career in litigation support as an Account Representative with Century City Legal Copy in 1997.  Ms. Kittner learned the business from the ground up and leveraged her experience and knowledge of tool and processes to move into sales management.  As a Sales Director, Ms. Kittner ran successful teams in multiple locations and enabled the Los Angeles location to be the most productive territory in the company.  She was transferred to Austin, Texas in the same role and built the territory and her team into top revenue producers.  Ms. Kittner’s proactive and customer-centric ideas won her opportunities to develop high level relationships from the West Coast to the Central region.