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I had the pleasure of participating in an ACEDS webinar to discuss how the pandemic has impacted law firms and legal departments and their use of eDiscovery platforms. In particular, how a remote or hybrid work model has significantly increased the use of collaboration technologies and the data that is generated from that communication. Compared to other verticals, the legal sector was uniquely impacted by the pandemic.
Over the past 18 months, there has been a significant rise in cloud and collaboration-based applications across all industries. Legal teams have witnessed an increased reliance on eDiscovery to process and review data derived from new sources of synchronous and asynchronous communication. With the changes and challenges since the start of 2020, we are seeing new issues emerge in addition to an overall shift in what the landscape of the legal world looks like. Right now, the way we collaborate is different. The way that we collect information is changing. And ultimately, with all that said, not every eDiscovery platform is built the same. Due diligence is required before judging every Legal Discovery product at face value.
For example, Casepoint’s cloud-based technology optimizes teamwork across departments in any organization. By offering an unlimited number of users in a single, secure cloud environment, Casepoint’s Legal Discovery platform can easily be configured for role-based security and provide permission settings that enable productive teamwork among users in different departments and diverse locations. Secure, friction-free collaboration in the cloud leads to faster, more defensible holds and collections. Teams can quickly connect to and upload data from cloud repositories and start reviewing faster. This technology helps with collection as well. In recent years, practitioners face more complex data collections and deal with challenges when data is delivered and pulled in convoluted ways or from a variety of sources. Casepoint’s cloud-based technology can help streamline this process and assuage potential issues.
Navigating Security Concerns
One of the unique challenges of the increasingly virtual legal professions centers around security. Attorneys need to take the utmost level of care to protect the highly sensitive and confidential information provided to them. When it comes to the utilization of personal devices and applications, there is a significant risk as it relates to the transfer of information. Someone may be using an authorized application, or perhaps their personal device does not have the necessary security in place. So how can this issue be dealt with properly?
The answer is a holistic and concerted effort to mitigate security risks. Firms, companies, and legal practitioners should have policies and measures in place that protect data from acquisition to final disposition. For instance, it is key to have two-factor authentication for all applications. By taking this simple yet important step, you are placing yet another layer of protection between your sensitive data and bad actors. It is also important to prevent the commingling of personal data storage and work data as well as managing PII throughout institutional storage.
Even though more and more people are working from home, there needs to be a separation between what is stored on personal devices and what is stored on work devices. It may be more convenient to view a highly confidential file on your personal tablet. However, that device must have all of the built-in security features that a work computer has enforced through mobile device management programs. Over the last year-and-a-half, legal professionals have increasingly worked remotely. But this shift to a virtual setting has also meant that security cannot be an afterthought, and this is where Casepoint’s Legal Discovery platform truly shines. Casepoint and all of its data centers have obtained and maintained the highest levels of industry-standard security certifications and attestations, undergoing all applicable reviews.
Changing the Way We Collaborate
As more and more legal professionals shifted to a virtual setting, the traditional model of collaborating also began to look different. With the days of meeting together in the office a vestige of the past for many, there is a pressing need to collaborate remotely. Yet there are challenges that arise with collecting, processing, and reviewing data from both cloud and collaboration applications. For teams working together, they need to figure out who the custodian of a document is, how many custodians there need to be, and negotiate ESI protocols, to give a few examples.
As we have seen since the onset of the pandemic, the use of collaborative platforms has risen sharply. We saw Microsoft Teams explode in popularity and millions and millions of messages sent daily in Slack channels. But with all of this extra activity, there are so many nuances that need to be navigated to ensure that the values of these platforms are being maximized.
With Casepoint’s CaseAssist AI technology users can process over 600 data types and locate specific data faster. Moreover, the predictions generated by our platform in eDiscovery, investigations, data privacy, and other document-intensive review projects eliminate the need for users to review documents that are nearly certain to be non-relevant, saving thousands of dollars in review time.
Ultimately, the pandemic has made the legal world far more virtual—and it looks like it is here to stay. Yet as more and more people continue to work from home, there are still many considerations that need to be navigated as legal professionals adjust to life in a remote setting. To this end, Casepoint is uniquely positioned with its Legal Discovery platform to meet the new challenges presented by a remote work environment by providing the functionality necessary to organize, store, process, and collect the specific metadata generated by various collaboration technologies utilized by today’s remote workforce.
