Cloud-Computing

 

What if you couldn't check your email from bed in the morning? Or share the status of a project with your colleague during your commute? It's hard to imagine not being able to access your work any time, anywhere. In the cloud-based world we live in, it feels like we have everything at our fingertips—but when it comes to e-discovery, it's not that simple. 

Think about all of the collaboration apps you use on a daily basis: GSuite, Slack, Quip, Salesforce, the list goes on. It's clear that the volume of ESI (electronically stored information) and the number of places it can live have dramatically increased, which makes retrieving the data you need more complicated. For corporate legal teams working on e-discovery, they've entered an entirely different ballgame. In this article, we'll cover the ways cloud collaboration apps are affecting e-discovery, and how corporate legal teams can confront potential challenges. 

1. Data is not always easy to locate: Knowing where your data resides is critical for e-discovery. The idea seems simple, but locating the ESI you need in the cloud can be anything but that. If your company stores ESI on a public cloud, your cloud vendor may be housing your data in multiple geographic locations. This can present difficulties as there are different data privacy and custody laws that may prevent your legal team from collecting the information you need. When you don't know where your data is being held or how it's being organized, the processing of e-discovery requests can get messy and expensive. For these reasons, it's important to ask the right questions surrounding the legal contract with your cloud service provider. You should always have a way to securely store and extract your data. 

2. Files are harder to identify: ESI is constantly being altered and scattered throughout multiple data silos. Knowing exactly where data is kept and how many copies of the data exist is key to collecting for e-discovery. Think about how many times you've edited, deleted, or collaborated on different applications. Whether it was slides for a presentation, a Word document, or a Slack message, every change you've ever made to a file is continuously synced and archived. Not to mention, your ability to move those files from one application to another adds another layer of complexity. In the case of e-discovery, providing an original defensible copy can be crucial evidence to the case. It's a good idea to have a preservation plan in place to show proof of modification and deletion. You can do this by choosing a technology that extracts data via APIs opposed to screengrabs that will only show content on a surface level. 

3. Data is more dynamic than ever: Think about everything we can now add to the “files” we work on: images, video, audio, GIFs, links—this creates extremely dynamic data sets. The more dynamic the data, the more complex it is to process, cull and export for review. It's important to utilize software that can identify files using a granular level of search so you're only processing the information you need. This ensures that no information will fall through the cracks when the time comes for litigation. Integrating with a software that has advanced language processing and OCR (optical character recognition) is key to analyzing files and ensuring you can find everything. This type of enrichment to data enables comprehensive reports for lawyers to review, thus saving you time and money. 

4. Greater risk of data manipulation: Many people think that data is automatically secure once it's in the cloud—this is a dangerous assumption. In fact, there are over 6 million data breaches every day where records are either lost or stolen. Given how easy it is to give others editing power to cloud data, as well as its ephemeral tendencies, it takes that much more to prove that recovered data has not been compromised or corrupted. For this reason, implementing a strong preservation and archive plan is essential to data integrity. Luckily, there are plenty of technologies that archive multiple versions of a modified file and also prevent unauthorized internal manipulation. 

5. Information governance policies are still catching up: The implementation of proper information governance policies is especially important now more than ever. Since the advent of cloud-based apps, high-value knowledge has not only been scattered across multiple data silos but is also piling up at an accelerated pace. As a result, it's become increasingly difficult for corporations to understand what they have and where, and to align appropriate retention policies. Given the ever-changing, real-time nature of the applications being used, it can be challenging to keep track of what information is and is not being preserved. It's critical that your company's IT and legal teams pair up to establish and refresh information governance policies if you haven't already. This way, you can easily retrieve information for operational or regulatory compliance needs when the time comes. 

These are only a few of the many ways cloud-based applications are changing the way we discover information. As cloud collaboration technology evolves, it's important to rethink your e-discovery and compliance methods to set your corporate legal team up for success. 

 

Russ Grant is the Vice President of Revenue at Onna Technologies in New York, where he leads the company's business team and manages the global team.  He focuses on high-value strategic enterprise initiatives and identifies productivity and collaboration trends in the modern workplace.