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Key Challenges Facing Legal Departments
Corporations are literally buried in data – most of it either redundant, obsolete, or trivial (ROT). While much of that data is unknown (i.e., “dark data”), eliminating “useless” data is not straightforward.
Add to it the complexity of protecting data under existing and newly arising privacy laws juxtaposed with the dramatic rise in ransomware and other cyber-attacks, the number of organizational risks has risen dramatically and thus putting more pressure on corporations to manage and reduce those risks.
These trends and changes within the corporate environment have led to a growing number of use cases for eDiscovery technology and workflows. While the traditional use for eDiscovery technology has been litigation, additional use cases have emerged to support investigations, audits, data privacy requests, incident response requests, and even HSR Second Requests to support mergers and acquisitions.
Key operational challenges facing legal departments today can be summarized within three broad categories:
- Effective Governance of data within the organization and addressing the challenges associated with the advent of “Big Data”
- Increased requirements for Compliance with data privacy laws and regulations
- Increased Risk associated with increased cyberattacks on corporations today.
These challenges have increased the number of discovery use cases to support legal departments and legal operations’ needs today. For corporate legal departments to address these challenges efficiently and effectively, it requires an operations-oriented approach, which emphasizes the importance of legal operations (“legal ops”) in corporations today.
CLOC and the CLOC Core 12 Functional Areas
Legal ops has emerged in importance within corporate legal departments to not only manage risks but to drive efficiency, efficacy, and help control costs. The rise of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), a large and growing community of legal operations professionals that are working together to educate this growing field, share knowledge and best practices with one another around legal operations technology, people, and processes.
In 2020, CLOC published an updated reference model called the “CLOC Core 12.” The CLOC Core 12 model reflects 12 core functional areas that legal ops professionals can reference to achieve consistent functional and operational maturity. CLOC created the Core 12 model to empower the legal ecosystem of operations professionals with educational resources, substantive data, and case studies to support and guide those who are new to setting up their departments or existing departments and who are encountering resistance to growth and change. The 12 core functional areas are:
Casepoint’s Enterprise eDiscovery Maturity Model
Earlier this year, Casepoint released a whitepaper that provides a practical framework to help you achieve eDiscovery and Legal Operations maturity. Our Enterprise eDiscovery Maturity Model discusses Five Stages of Maturity that reflect the maturity of your eDiscovery operations.
Each of the CLOC Core 12 functional areas complements the Five Stages of Maturity represented in the Casepoint Enterprise eDiscovery Maturity Model and all of them influence – and are influenced by – eDiscovery, Compliance, and Risk (ECR).
Those five stages in the maturity model are:
If you are a corporate legal department that aims to achieve operational maturity, one of the quickest ways to achieve it is by focusing on eDiscovery, Compliance, and Risk (ECR) management maturity. Casepoint’s Enterprise eDiscovery Maturity Model provides an optimal path to not only achieve eDiscovery maturity but overall operational maturity across all 12 functional areas of the CLOC Core 12.
Casepoint’s most recent white paper explores in-depth how Legal Operations maturity and eDiscovery, Compliance, and Risk (ECR) relate to the CLOC Core 12, in addition to how legal departments can leverage a maturity model to overcome ECR challenges.
Casepoint’s Legal Operations Maturity Model in Action
A legal operations maturity model for action is meaningless unless there’s evidence of the model in action, and of benefits accrued. A recent case study offers us compelling evidence of the benefits that the Casepoint eDiscovery Maturity Model — coupled with Casepoint technology — brings to an organization.
A major Berkshire Hathaway corporation needed an eDiscovery solution that would enable them to gain control of and more efficiently manage their data while supporting their unique workflows and processes. In addition, they sought ways to reduce costs and increase operational efficiency. The client’s legal department sought an eDiscovery technology solution that had the ability to collect, process, review, analyze, and produce information at scale.
They not only sought a best-fit eDiscovery product, but a company that could partner with them to understand their unique needs, guide them in their eDiscovery maturity journey, support their unique workflows, deliver custom solution requirements, and ultimately grow with them over the years.
The client went through a rigorous selection process, which included 31 different product and client service evaluation criteria that was evaluated through a multi-step procurement process. Casepoint’s extensible end-to-end, AI-powered SaaS eDiscovery solution was selected because of the clear strength of our technology, the expertise of our client service team, our client engagement model, and competitive pricing.
After 2 years using Casepoint to support their discovery needs, the results were:
- Cost reduction and increased efficiency
- Elimination of multiple legacy systems
- Streamlined legal operations functions through process automation
- Legal department won a prestigious company-wide award for managing cost, high return on investment, and strong collaboration for integrating Casepoint with other systems and process automation
- Roll-out of Casepoint to other groups in the company has been given the green light due to early successes
Start Your Journey to Legal Operations Maturity Today
Casepoint’s maturity model provides guidance and a framework for effective eDiscovery, Compliance, and Risk (ECR) in relation to the CLOC Core 12. Download the whitepaper to see how legal departments can leverage a maturity model to overcome challenges with ECR and all of CLOC’s Core 12 functional areas.
