Springtime in eDiscovery: Legalweek 2022

It is appropriate that Legalweek 2022 was held in March – our team left feeling invigorated, enthusiastic, and joyful. 

Part of it was seeing old friends and meeting new ones. Attendees were all coming out of hibernation and there was a lot of great energy and momentum. People were too excited being together to care whether this was someone’s first Legalweek or their 50th.  

Part of it was the weather – sure, it wouldn’t be Legalweek without a snowstorm, but we also got some great sunshine.  

Part of it was the content. People were talking about new partnerships, new approaches, new projects. Our panel with Nuix, “A Sensitive (Data) Subject,” was one of (at least) three that covered ways eDiscovery tools and teams were tackling other kinds of projects. 

No one was talking about roadblocks… everyone was there to talk about building, transforming, and delivering. 

People have been doing the hard work for listening, building trust, planning, measuring, and advocating, and those seeds are starting to flower! 

Here are 20 “seeds” planted by our panel, hosted by Matthew Geaghan (Nuix), featuring Tricia Kelly (Latham), Toni Millican (Trinity Industries), Krista Ellis (Credit Agricole) and our very own Ryan Best (Rampiva):  

  1. Regulators want to know what we’re doing to prevent employees from sending company data to their personal emails and devices. 
  1. It used to be about protecting the network from other people coming in – now, it’s about knowing where everything is in our network… for DLP, departing employees, M&A, etc. 
  1. Tools and teams are siloed… and that was impacting response time. 
  1. We have our day to day, but a special project comes along and it’s the last thing we have time for. Particularly with the staff attribution – resourcing is a challenge, particularly in the face of a surge in activity. 
  1. You need a defensible process so you can delete data and not keep it around to be requested through DSARs. We’re deleting data and I’m thrilled to say that. 
  1. Stakeholders trust us because we’ve demonstrated the reliability and rigor of our process. 
  1. I’m passionate about the destruction of records – we have a lot of retention obligations, but we also now have a positive mandate to destroy. 
  1. We assume GDPR applies to all of us – it’s too messy otherwise 
  1. The landscape is changing rapidly, so you have to assume privacy rules will apply to systems and processes – even if they don’t already. 
  1. We have the eDiscovery problem solved – we have options. These other use cases aren’t solved, so we’re still seeing problems we’ve never seen before. A lot of pieces still need to be figured out. 

From left to Right: Krista Ellis (Credit Agricole), Toni Millican, CEDS (Trinity Industries), Ryan Best (Rampiva), Tricia Kelly (Latham), and Matthew Geaghan (Nuix)
  1. I went on a roadshow to introduce myself and my team to build trust and relationship. This helped me get IG included on strategic plans. 
  1. There are tools for each thing, but we needed one team and one tool. 
  1. Don’t ask what the tool does – ask what you can make it do. 
  1. It helps to partner with technology vendors and service providers who have a long-term vision. 
  1. When you think about automation, it seems like a heavy lift that should take 12 to 18 months. Transitioning to Nuix with Rampiva, we got great results inside of 6 months. 
  1. We wanted our lawyers to have an advanced review process, but then we wanted them to know that we were also reducing turnaround time, improving quality, and taking more control – which helped us pick Nuix and Rampiva. 
  1. We’ve used automation to take the pain of the day-to-day away and it’s unleased a lot of creativity and new approaches, which is a lot of fun. 
  1. I want to reward my team by giving them more opportunities to be data experts, not just button clickers. It really helps with retention. 
  1. Advanced tools and automation give your team more growth opportunities – design, performance optimization, project consulting – and a sense of delivering real progress towards a vision. 
  1. This is the future for my team… data is gold, and we are data experts. So, I’m giving my experts access to new questions. 

Legalweek 2022 was a great reminder that it always starts with “people” – the thought leaders, industry visionaries, change makers, and doers. Thank you to everyone who made time to share ideas, lessons and good cheer! We look forward to seeing you all again.  

Share
Comments are closed.