Becoming the Legal Platform Every Company Needs

The following is the second post in a new blog series from Exterro CEO Bobby Balachandran, where he shares his thoughts on the issues legal leaders care about and his vision for addressing them.

More than a decade ago, I (along with many others) noticed that most businesses and individual business units had an array of software options designed specifically to help them manage tasks and do their jobs more effectively and efficiently.

But not the legal department.

Providers like Peoplesoft offered HR departments the ability to manage employee information, benefits, and even retirement plans all through one system. SAP and Oracle built enterprise resource and business planning systems to run the world’s largest companies. IBM made software development at scale possible. Even small accounting departments had QuickBooks. The list goes on and on.

But there wasn’t anything like that for legal departments.

It’s taken a long time to get here, but legal is finally catching up, moving away from single-point applications to adopting robust platforms capable of tackling more than one or two specialized tasks. Why? Because the issues legal is accountable for have grown exponentially in magnitude and complexity and finding a better way to manage it all is a necessity, not a nice to have. But, until now, no all-in-one solution has been capable of helping legal manage, quarterback, and complete the major required of them.

That’s until now—with Exterro as the first truly integrated Legal Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) platform solution delivering greater efficiency and defensibility at lower costs.

As I said in my previous post, part of Exterro’s journey toward becoming a true multi-use legal platform was because the market demanded it. Today, general counsel and chief legal officers understand there are ways to use technology more effectively to solve their unique business challenges across a wide array of use cases, with data management requirements and data privacy regulations critical forces in the movement.

That’s why we built Exterro to be the only legal data management platform that legal departments will ever need. We recognize that legal performs are better when they have one platform capable of responding to complex data requests, from litigation and internal investigations to data privacy requirements.

Integrating Business Planning, Modeling, and Data Management

One way Exterro is empowering GCs and CLOs to integrate business planning, modeling, and data management is by changing the way businesses look at their legal and compliance objectives as integrated and across departments—because risk management challenges truly reach all areas of the business. With a growing list of increasingly complex compliance mandates to follow, business processes must keep up with the speed of the law in order to comply, and that requires a comprehensive strategy that encourages collaboration to mitigate risk, as well as powerful technology.

The GC/CLO is now more equipped to advise on those needs than anyone else in the business, so it’s crucial they take the lead in coordinating risk mitigation processes. To be able to effectively safeguard an organization, legal needs to be able to quickly find, access, and collect high quality enterprise data to comply with evolving legal and regulatory requirements. And that means managing data with a comprehensive strategy that includes knowing where it lives, who owns it, which regulations govern it, and which third parties can access it.

We’ve built the industry’s most powerful Legal GRC platform to allow the GC/CLO to fully understand and mitigate enterprise risk. Exterro is taking the approach that defensible, smart data management that utilizes the latest technology and AI is the most effective way to reduce risk end-to-end across the enterprise.

In my next post, I’ll look more extensively at how Exterro is able to effectively address e-discovery, data privacy compliance capabilities, and other investigation and forensics needs by talking about our evolution—and how we’ve moved from our beginnings as the industry leader in legal hold software to a multi-dimensional provider of data and risk management and Legal GRC.

Read Bobby's first post here.