“In the post-digital world, every company is an information company.”
Mark Barrenechea’s quote at OpenText™ Enterprise World in Toronto ought to be a wake-up call to legal professionals everywhere that legaltech and eDiscovery are no longer optional. With nearly three-quarters of US states imposing new technical competency obligations, the era of the information lawyer has more than just arrived.
At Enterprise World in July, OpenText announced a major legaltech expansion to deliver the information advantage to legal teams. To support this we had some of the most tech-savvy and innovative lawyers in the world join us at the event to share their expertise and best practices for handling electronically stored information (ESI) and conquering eDiscovery. These experts also shared their thoughts on crafting better policies to defensibly delete data, manage mobile devices, and improve litigation readiness posture.
How much data is too much data?
When an organization anticipates litigation, the first step is distributing a notice to preserve data (legal hold) and collect it. Organizations that approach legal hold in an ad hoc fashion invite risk, innocently or maliciously. Documents can be lost, metadata can be altered, and legal consequences can follow. Custodian self-collection is prone to failure and a more defensible approach – supported by legal technology – that automates tracking, escalation, and remote data collection is preferred. The best corporate legal operations teams will have legal technology and processes in place to generate a targeted collection set in a forensically sound manner.
Investigate everything
Once your legal team has the data, they still need to investigate it. The analysis process has its own challenges: How do you identify the key documents early in the process and reduce the effort of getting through the junk? How do you investigate the most common data sources – email and smartphones?
Our “Smartphone Investigations” panel looked at the treatment of corporate policies and how different approaches and devices impact investigations. They exposed hidden data that must be extracted, organized, and included as well. Phone cameras, for example, capture additional EXIF data including GPS location, device information, and time stamps. Meanwhile, more and more apps have a messaging component as an alternative to regular text. And wiping your phone doesn’t necessarily mean that data is out of reach for a skilled forensic investigator.
Our “Email investigation strategies” session explained how to use data visualization tools to isolate and investigate anomalous behavior patterns, how to use conceptual search techniques to crack codewords, and how to mitigate potential fallout in real-time as scope and sensitivity grows.
Why lawyers are adopting AI faster than you
In the Discovery track, our “Why Lawyers Are Adopting AI Faster Than You” panellists explained how machine learning tools, including OpenText Discovery solutions, help to automate the tedious and expensive process of document review. Attorneys want to read the key documents that are relevant to the matter at hand, but without the help of AI they must wade through mountains of irrelevant junk.
And the “Legal Technology and Enterprise Discovery at Scale” session focused on identifying the technologies and deployments that help solve each phase of the eDiscovery process from holds and collections to analysis and production.
Join us at Enfuse 2019 in Las Vegas
We invite you to join us in November for Enfuse 2019 in Las Vegas, featuring even more eDiscovery and LegalTech insight, guidance and content.
