E-Discovery

The Best Quotes from E-Discovery Day 2019

December 6, 2019

• Share to Twitter
• Share to LinkedIn
• Share to Facebook

“Invest in training. It doesn’t have to be expensive, but the more employees know about the issues and how important they can be to the success of an organization, the more likely they will be to self-audit and stay alert to potential problems with the current processes.”

“Training is an ongoing activity and should never end. There is always something that can be done better, faster, or more efficiently.”

“More training after deployment might move the needle—most providers train at the beginning of an engagement. Perhaps there is intermediate training that can be offered.”

"I think we have more teams thinking about the process of their discovery response, rather than the individual action items that need to happen. I think that’s a pretty big, philosophical change for organizations to start thinking about the entire discovery response process from a process orchestration mentality.”

“The first [benefit is] efficiency. When you have a robust legal hold process, it’s nice to have it all in one place, a defined process so you know where everything is. I’m not scrambling, going between different programs, different spreadsheets, different emails trying to figure out what I’ve done before. It’s all in one place, and, as a result of that, is just much quicker. And the second part is defensibility. It’s definitely much easier to be able to present to the court that we have a robust program.”

“When we made the decision to automate our process and make it more sophisticated, that created synergy between departments, and actually connected our processes in a way that made it more like one overarching process that we each had roles and ownership in. It increased our communication. As our separate processes became one and more unified, out of that flowed efficiency and consistency. And then as you implement a process that’s consistent, out of that will flow defensibility.”

“Proportionality continues to be an area where there’s a lot of discussion going on with the courts, especially how to apply the proportionality factors to determine appropriate scope. So we’re seeing a lot more cases that are looking at that and trying to move that forward. Secondly, as always preservation and spoliation are there. Now what we are seeing is that courts are starting to really try to focus on the rule 37(e) spirit. Next would be cooperation, with a lot more decisions where the courts are expecting that parties will meet and confer in good faith in an attempt to reach agreement on the discovery scope.”

“Data security needs to be made a priority. The upfront cost of improving this area may seem significant, but compared to the long-term indirect costs of failing in this area, it is worth it.”

 

“Security is no longer ‘nice to have’ or ‘check the box’—clients are demanding it.”

“While there has not been a huge uptick on what I would call ‘cross-border cases,’ as the GDPR matures, as well as other jurisdictions, more courts will need to be educated on specific foreign laws related to cross-border discovery, and burden arguments in regard to the search and collection of that information.”

“My biggest fear—and the biggest fear of other leaders—is that they don’t know what they don’t know. There’s just so much in this area that could be going on in terms of information and data that’s being captured and collected through various devices or through various social media outlets used by companies. And it’s that fear of the unknown out there that I think keeps us from saying, ‘Yes, absolutely, we’re prepared for the GDPR and CCPA and the new world of data privacy and e-discovery.’”

“We recognize that this is a different kind of workflow, when you’re responding to these types of requests for personal information, and what you need to do to get started is to build on what works. And what works is what we already have for a lot of our e-discovery processes, because those have been tested over years. The petabytes of data have flowed through the tools that are in this space—the people, the teams, the processes designed to handle volume. And although not all of the components of the EDRM are present, when you respond to a Data Subject Access Request, many of them are.”

“I tend to get bored really easily—data entry would not be my thing. The same type of job day-in and day-out—that wouldn’t be for me. I enjoy E-Discovery because my skillset sets me apart from others. I have my fingers in cases like employment, IT, commercial, internal investigations. And the other part that intrigues me is the technology. I like to know a little bit about everything, and I enjoy the challenges of the job.”

“As many in this field know, e-discovery and information governance can often be very inter-related and dependent on each other. So for me, that’s been a way to leverage the skills I’ve learned as part of my career in e-discovery and put them toward contributing to the goals of the company in privacy-related spaces.”