Video: How to Avoid an eDiscovery Nightmares | Duration: 3536s | Summary: How to Avoid an eDiscovery Nightmares

Transcript for "How to Avoid an eDiscovery Nightmares": Hello everybody and welcome to today's webinar on how to avoid an e discovery nightmare. My name is Brendan lock marketing campaign manager at reveal. And today, I'll be your event producer. But before I turn this webinar over to our esteemed panelists, there are a few housekeeping items. I want to share with you all. While the thought leadership side of this webinar was recorded yesterday, there will be a live q and a at the end of this webinar. So you have any questions, please submit your questions in the q and a section on the right side of your screen, and we'll try to answer as many of your questions as we can at the end of the webinar. Also, at the end of the webinar, there will be a quick three question survey. We would absolutely love your feedback. So if you could please take 30 seconds to fill it out, that would be amazing. Another common question we get asked all the time is, will this webinar be available on demand? And the answer is yes. You will receive an email tomorrow with the on demand version, and it will also be available on reveals website. Lastly, if you would like to learn more about any of reveals products, I welcome you to request a demo by clicking the button on the upper right hand side of your screen. And with that, I'm gonna turn this webinar over to our panelists. Brendan, and thank you all for joining us today. Before we get started with the subject matter of today's, webinar, I'd like the speakers to introduce themselves. I'll start with myself. I'm George Scioscia. I have been at Reveal for about 4 years and wear a multitude of hats. And since I'm not the important one here, I'm gonna turn it to other our other speakers. Let's start with you, Adela. Sure. And we'll go from there. Okay. Adela Wexeblatt. I'm senior director for legal operations at Veolia North America, and I've been here for 25 years. And the company has morphed over the years, so we've had multiple names. We started as United Water, then we were it was a few years ago, and now we are Veolia. And our department has doubled in size in the last 5 years. Challenges then must abound. Yes. Just a few. Just a few. Wendy, how do? Hi. I'm Wendy Weber. I am a senior paralegal at Dropbox, and I manage the discovery program, data retention, handle all litigation, and some employment. And I've been at Dropbox for 6 years. Just had my anniversary, actually, last week. Congratulations. And and, Heather, you? So I'm Heather Harmon. I am the ediscovery specialist at Starbucks. My main role is data preservation collection and production. I've been with Starbucks for two and a half years. I've been in the industry for 27 years. So relatively new to the company compared to the other 2, but all of you seasoned pros when it comes to this talk. Today's, webinar, as as Brendan indicated, is how to avoid the e discovery nightmare. And we can't guarantee to all of you that if you follow our suggestions, you will be able to avoid 1, but you can at least reduce the chances somewhat. We've got 5 areas we want to cover in the available time. We're gonna take about 40, 45 minutes for this portion. Once we're done with this, we'll come back on with the live q and a. This part is recorded. The q and a will follow. As many of us as are able, you know, technical problems and the like cooperating, we'll join for the answers as or the question answer portion as well. I'd like to start with when you're looking at how to avoid any discovery nightmare, how you address the problem that we have been facing for 30 plus years in ediscovery. Each year, we think it's worse than ever before, and the next year, it gets worse after that. The whole issue of data overload. What it what it means and, more importantly, what you can do about them. So on these initial questions, I'll start calling people out. But very quickly, I know I'm not going to need to do that. So with this one, let's start, with you, Heather, because you're the newest at the organization. Can identifying those problems is probably more top of mind for you than for Adela or for Wendy. This is definitely something that we think about and have discussions on often, as a company that is growing not on a retail side, but also internally. So on the nonretail side, which would include all those folks in Seattle, which I am not. I am in Phoenix as a remote partner. But having the understanding of what each person has in terms of their devices and assets, what are they doing with them, how are they handling their own data preservation. We do have all the firewall set up. We do back end preservation obviously and focus on legal hold. But you still don't when you have so many employees across the board having an understanding of where the data goes, where it sits, and how long that retention schedule is for each area is that piece is challenging in itself. So just having that data map on who owns what, that's also a big issue, that we face often, and making sure that everyone understands the taxonomy related to how long we're preserving and and maintaining data. I'm sure with other companies and law firms, PSTs are a big problem. They get very big. They overload the system. You end up finding out that you think you don't have that much data, in your email, and lucky looky, you've got terabytes of data, and you're like, oh, I didn't realize I had that. So under having your employees understand that and understand what that impact has, That also goes into data breaches too if if we haven't had 1, knock on wood. But that's not it's not a question of it. It's just a question of when, and how we handle that as a company and looking at size retention, cloud based storage. That's kind of what we what I work on on a daily basis. So, Adela, for you, is it it similar, different, and if it's different, how so? So it's it's both. So it's similar and it's different in in the aspect of we do try to manage data retention by communicating with all of our employees. We have a brand new retention schedule that we've rolled out. We've rolled out some training. We are partially regulated in one of our business lines, so the retention requirements there are different than in other parts of the business. But 3 years ago, we went through a merger where data the amount of data that, you know, the 2 companies had in bringing that together on one platform was massive. We also moved from a Microsoft environment to a Google environment. Moving that data was cumbersome and understanding what needed to be moved and what was a nice to have and what we really didn't need. That had its own set of issues when it comes to ediscovery, making sure that we were preserving things that were subject to legal hold, was problematic because servers are being decommissioned and trying to make sure that we retrieve the data that we had. But it's all about making sure that you're communicating. You know, data breaches are real, and, you know, I'm in the environmental services space. You know, you pick up the newspaper any day. There's another company, you know, similar to us who is having an issue and making sure that we are protecting our data is really foremost and making sure our employees realize that, you know, there's no need to hold on to absolutely everything now coming from the legal department. We are hoarders by nature. Right? So we keep everything, but realizing that we also need to be applying the retention schedule to to the data that we're retaining, and making sure that our own staff and team is doing that is really important. So for us, it's a lot of communicating. And, Wendy, how does it look from your vantage point? I mean, I think there's obviously things that are similar in from the employee side, right, and sort of employee devices. Having an idea of what everybody has, the, you know, dealing with BYOD, which I think a lot of us are still invite BYOD mode for the most part. And what obligations we have to collect from those who are in legal hold when it comes to those devices. You know, it's the same kind of issues we're dealing with 20 years ago. As far as, you know, not getting overloaded with data, I'm gonna sound like a broken record, but you look at the it starts on the left hand side with data retention. So if you don't have data retention in place or we don't have a program in place, you're always gonna end up with a massive amount of data. And when you think about that funnel from starting at the beginning of your collection process and coming down into what you're exporting, what you're reviewing, what you produce, that top of the tunnel, the funnel is gonna be like this instead of maybe like this. Couple common themes here. 1 is, knowing what data you have and where it is, a data map, whatever that is. And I to be honest, I'm That's an art that's a term of art, not a science. Yep. And then as well, doing a really good job of, laying out and managing the whole process. So on the first part, data maps. Can anyone have you enlightened me? You'd think I'd know what a data map is, but I don't really know for sure what people refer to when they say that. What what do you all mean by that? Heather, you were the first one to bring that up. So for for us at Starbucks, our data map is identifying this subject matter expert of whichever department and meeting with them, having conversations with them, and building out where what are they using? Where are they using it? What are they retaining? Are they following the retention schedule? Is anyone on legal hold and tracking all that. And it is very cumbersome when it comes to any company that has, a multitude of departments, especially when you're also talking not just US based, but you have APAC and the EU, China, it also create choose making sure that you understand who owns what, where, and what are they doing with it. I would guess that Wendy and Adela, you both face similar complex challenges in this. What additional suggestions do you have for more effectively dealing with that that data overload at the upfront and then how it's handled through the the, the, whole process? Yeah. I think you really need to have a strong partnership with your internal IT departments. And, you know, usually, it's the internal IT departments doing the data mapping, I would say, at least in my experience, not legal, but there should be a partnership there. There's a number of ways you can do that, and some of that's through procurement. Right? Well, when you get new systems and having that workflow, you can, you know, security reviews, other things. There's lots of different ways to do it. But what do you do with the stuff that you already have? And so really being able to have a strong partner with the internal IT, to understand maybe what work they've already done when you're asking yourselves these questions from a legal perspective in addition to what other work needs to be done, how you know, what services can we offer from a legal perspective and from a department perspective. And, I mean, I when we use the word mapping, you think of visual, but a lot of this is a spreadsheet. Right? So what kind of what's the final form? What does this look like? And finally knowing that you're never done. You're it's never there's no such thing as, like, the map is complete. Yeah. Nor is it gonna capture everything unless you heavily monitor your employees. So Any of you, just out of curiosity, have any of you hired an external party to come in and yeah. Okay. We have as well, and it's it's older now because it has been a few years. And so you almost feel like you have to start from almost from scratch to identify because of turnover and changes in departments. Also, with what we all do, departments change. They change names. They change who they funnel up to. Who do they you know? So what was a year ago is maybe no longer today. And I think that's especially true tech, at least in my experience, is that, prior to Dropbox, I were articulated sciences. That's a regulated industry, similar to Adela, right, where you have different obligations around retention, different obligations and structure. And the constant motion of tech is kind of dizzying, and it does really require you to do and redo and redo again your work. And so Yep. At some point For us, it's why. Yeah. For us, it's interesting. We we have a very close partnership with our IT department, but we also have data protection officers who reside inside the legal department. So they're working very closely with those team. You know, I I work just proximity wise so closely with the, DPOs that I'm able to hear from them what they need and then be able to decipher that out to the rest of the legal team if there's something that they need to know. But it we really are relying on our IT group to do a lot of that work for us, but we still have to be knowledgeable as to what's going on. We have a couple of initiatives right now that I kinda heard about after the fact that will have a direct effect on my team. And I immediately jumped in because I'm like, before you guys turn things off, please let's find out what the ripple effect will be because that that could happen too. And sometimes it's done in the guys of we need to turn this server off because it's at risk. But by doing that, you're gonna cause a a a problem for me down the road. So Right. Having open communication and having a team that I can pick up the phone and just say, hey. Hit pause for a second, and, let's talk about this before we go forward is really helpful. And it's hard not to be seen as a blocker. Right? Like Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's such tension between legal and IT in some ways. Like, we really should be good partners, but there's also times where it's like, sorry. We have a legal obligation that allow us to do that. Yeah. I've often started conversations saying, I don't mean to be an obstacle, but Totally. It is It is often said that technology got us into this mess and only technology is going to get us out of this mess. Whether it's only technology is certainly debatable, but techno, the tools we use can make a difference. How do you all go about figuring out what's the right technology for you to use to address the problems that eDiscovery pose for you poses for you? Well, mine's probably the easier question of of that one. So the company I was originally with did not have an ediscovery tool. We were doing it all manually. It was cumbersome. There were too many people involved. You know, lawyers would issue a legal hold. We'd work with IT to access whatever data we needed to access. It'd be stored on a secure site. Outside counsel would be retained. You'd get search terms. You'd we would have IT search the terms for us and then move that data to some sort of SharePoint site or OneDrive or something that outside counsel could have access to, and then they'd come back and say, no. We need more. So you're back and forth and back and forth. Right? The company we merged with had a new discovery tool, and so we eased into it. And we're like, why did we not have this before? Does it make life so much easier? So, yeah, so I kind of fell into it. So you got lucky? The choice left me, you were bored. Maybe the other 2 of you weren't so lucky. I also came into a company with nobie discovery tools, which was interesting to me. Again, coming from a heavily regulated company where those things were much more necessary and urgent. And, really, what I had to do was understand how Dropbox works. Right? Like, I had to understand how Dropbox works and who works with Dropbox. And I'm sure many can relate that with good intention, vendors make promises to things. But sometimes it's a show and tell. Right? And you can't really be shown until you actually get the product. And so, it took me a little while, maybe about 9 months, to find something that truly was going to be able to collect from Dropbox in a meaningful way that would meet our legal obligations. I think at the time, everyone was very concerned about Slack, and I was like, that's not my concern. But but it all it all worked out in the end. Yeah. And, you know, I think it's hard. It's hard to get legal departments to spend money on something they can't see. It's like the infrastructure of your house or, like, you know, dealing with beams and how much that beam is gonna cost to make an open concept when you watch HGTV. Like, you don't see it, but it cost you $5,000. And so it it I think it's hard when you don't when not everyone's aware of any discovery obligations. You don't necessarily have a litigation profile for it, but you might be working towards 1. And getting people to truly understand sort of risks and and benefits to having the right software to help you do the job. I'll tack on to that. I do feel and when you talk about, like, cost analysis on bringing in a new product, it is very difficult for ediscovery folks to come to the table asking for large sums of money because it's always large sums of money in order to handle data, and getting, you know, c suite level executives on board. And and, you know, I've worked in litigation for 30 years, more than 30 years now, and we're always seen as the as the losing. We're always losing money. And and when in reality, you know, we're not we're not losing money. We may be spending, but we're we're bringing money back in. It's just how you look at it. And so I we have found it to be somewhat difficult, and the best way that we have that my team has been able to, get approvals to bring technology in house was to get you just need 1 person on board, one executive on board that understands, that has a level of understanding of what happens if you're not properly handling data to push it through. And we have locked out recently in bringing a tool in house that we're using that's been helping a lot. But it is very difficult. It all comes down to money. Yeah. I think what's interesting is I feel like I have to be an alarmist Yeah. With executives and those people to be like, hey. Here's our and it's a little bit of insurance talk, and I don't know if either of you deal with insurance. But it's like, here's the exposure analysis of this. And here's the exposure analysis specifically if you don't meet these obligations of the discovery. Somehow, that has actually helped me to be able to say, look. I don't not saying everyone's gonna sanction or we're gonna get sanctioned, but this is what could happen. So depending on who your audience is, one could say, hey. Here's what the exposure is. And so I've learned a little bit from, like, my finance partners really and how we can talk about the exposure is this much for this case. We settled it for this much. Yes. That's a lot of money, but look at how much we saved by and not risking getting this verdict. This is using that same sort of analysis and plan to be able to talk about here's what we can do and reduce this risk overall, for these cases, not just one case. Right? You sound like you're getting a new tool per case. It's it covers everything. Right. But that's the conversation you have every budget season. Right? Because when they when they start looking at your budget and they're they're like, well, why do you need this really expensive tool? And then you have to start talking about risk because Yep. That that's the only way people are gonna listen. Yeah. They're just gonna wanna hear, oh, it makes my life easier. No. They wanna hear, what's the risk to the company if we don't have it? Well, let me tell you. Yeah. I mean, I think there's the the legal risks, but there's also the people risk. Right? Like, if you don't have these tools, you will have to hire more people to figure out how to manually extract data and what this looks like. And then maybe you're not meeting deadlines. You're not meeting court deadlines. You're gonna have to attend. I mean, there is a ripple effect there. But if you don't understand litigation or you're just not, you know, it it depends on your audience. Right? So I think sorry, George. I think you were yeah. No. There's also if I could chime in for a second, there's also the data privacy Right? So if you don't have a tool and you've got other people involved and you're talking about data that could have PII in it, now you've got you've opened up a whole another can of worms. So having Yeah. A tool that takes the human element out of a lot of that work, I think, is real it just it it protects everybody. It protects the employee. It protects the customer. It protects the company. You know? I mean, it's just you know? Yeah. I I that's a good I think it's a really good point. Wendy, to tack on to you when you're talking about, you know, that risk analysis and what happens in the courtroom, what will a judge sanction you if you aren't following some ESI protocol? We have found it always beneficial to throw another company under the bus that has had a very heavy verdict. Yep. In the news, enter, you know, such company. That can be us if we don't take steps. And that is also another big driving point that people do understand because it is in the news. And just like Yeah. Is in the news all the time. You want you always wanna present best foot forward, so you don't want to have these huge sanctions. Yeah. We used, the Google g chat example Yes. Right, to help, talk about data retention. Yep. People seem motivated, so that was good. Motivator because we used it too. So you all have mentioned, data retention requirements, privacy concerns, and the like. What other compliance challenges, are you up against, and how do you address those when it comes to eDiscovery in particular? I mean, I think everyone's talked about privacy, and there's different ways of dealing with privacy. But we've also touched a little bit on data breaches. Right? And my company has been part of a data breach somewhat recently. And I think that, you know, Dropbox takes, you know, security incredibly seriously more so than I've ever seen in any any other company. My legal hold notices, someone will say, is this spam? Are you fishing for something? So I know that we take it seriously. The world is what it is. We're almost anything you do is never gonna protect you enough from those kinds of things. But I think it goes to this idea of what how do we handle risk and and and ediscovery and also this and this data exposure. Right? So you have privacy requirements. You have your legal obligations, related to legal holds, but you also have this sort of almost imminent aspect of data breaches. How do all these things go together? And then when you have a matter, you have a litigation about those specific things. What does that go to? And so I think we often talk about, you know, legal holds and talking about emails and Slacks and messaging, if I'm a messaging, those things. But how are you gonna deal with the source code? How are you gonna deal with these technical logs related to these things? Right? How what's your data governance around customer logs? What's your data governance around these other things? And these are things that have previously not come up for me, but are coming up for me now and having to learn a lot about what we decide to retain and what that looks like. And, of course, not on your data map. No one's talked about it before. If you've worked with any companies, somebody else made that decision. So it's an interesting area that's come up for me that I don't think the I don't think we talk about very often actually in these sessions, but imagine how many logs you have, how many how many terabytes could that be? You know? So I'm sorry. I hope that answers your question a little bit. I'm hoping I'm not getting off top. But I think, you know, aside from I think privacy and this sort of threat of of data breaches really does go into this weighing of what your obligation to preserve is mixed with the data retention piece, which are always opposite of each other. Right? Data retention says get rid of it as soon as possible, which privacy does too almost more aggressively. And legal hold says keep everything forever, which that's not what you should do. But that's so Yeah. Exactly. Right. I mean, in trying to manage the all of those things. Right? If you don't have an ediscovery platform of some kind, you are you are really opening up an opportunity for the wrong people to have access to that information because IT turnover happens. And so the person you had who knew where your legal hold documentation was, on a specific server that no one else is using has now left. Now what do you do? Right? Having a tool, you have the ability to change access, limit access, open access. And once the matter is done, you can reduce that access again, taking out all the extraneous people who needed it at the time and just limit it to that core group within the legal department and then be able to if those people leave during the time frame that you need to retain it, you can just change the access. But you don't have multitudes of people who potentially could get in there and not knowingly, but, you know, inadvertently destroy the data. And now what do you do? You know? So I I I I like the idea of not only from a privacy perspective, but from a security perspective of being able to to kinda really lock down that data and keep it to only a few people who really need access to it, that you can control. Cost invariably comes up as an issue, and there's been some mention of it now. And then the escalation of costs. You all have budgets. It's often felt to me like in house people live and die by their budgets more than anything else. Mhmm. And and, yes, budgets more than anything else. Mhmm. And and yet you see increasing costs for the software and the service, both that you use for ediscovery. How do you address that, or how do you suggest people more effectively manage that? I will I will challenge, and then I actually think e discovery costs have been reduced. And part of that, at least in my experience, has been because of the cloud, because people are working more in the cloud, Competition. Right? There's a lot of options out there. I would still say it's expensive, but when I look at the contracts, for ServiceNow or Snowflake or GitHub, we're still talking about a lot less money than those. And, yes, you could argue that, ediscovery tools are not enterprise, but I'd actually argue that they are enterprise. Right? Just because they don't have as many users. So I think there is this thought that ediscovery tools are expensive. I think what's expensive is the processing of the data. But you can control that if you think about the things that we just talked about and deal with the data retention. So, not to be a oppositional George, but I just I don't I actually think eDiscovery costs are coming down, because of competition, because of the way we handle data now, because of, the diligence that people, I think, like, these people on this call have done around data retention and managing, you know, expectations and what you truly need. That also goes to the lawyers who are negotiating the terms of what those things So, yeah, those are my 2¢. That's actually encouraging to hear because whether it's an annual or monthly amount I pay for Dropbox or a cup of coffee I bought buy for Starbucks, whatever it might be, the cost of that e discovery software has to come from somewhere. It does. And I think that's the challenge. And I and I will agree with Wendy. I do think we we, as end users of technology have driven some of those prices down. Certainly, storage, the cost of storage is way cheaper than it used to be. But, unfortunately, we also have a ton more data. So while the cost has gone down, we just have exponentially more data, which continues to grow and grow and grow, even when we follow the retention schedule that our companies set in line. I I do think competition is good. It gives us more options. I think in most companies, they you just don't wanna budget for it is where it boils down to because it's not tangible. You don't see it. You don't see, you know, any type of pleadings or discovery that's on your computer. Like, oh, yeah. That's where my $75,000 went. Yeah. It's in the cloud. It's up there somewhere that we don't see. And I think that's where some of the struggle is on cost because you're not seeing it. If we saw it, like a cup of coffee or log in to Dropbox and see our documents, it would look different. Mhmm. Yeah. We've been pretty lucky in coffee. Yeah. We've been pretty lucky in that the, you know, they'll question it once every couple of years. They you know, do we really need this? Do they need to be this expensive? And, you know, at the end of the day, when you talk about the different kinds of litigation that we might be involved in or what the risk is, usually, they quiet down. But we do try to proactively keep on top of how much data we're keeping and storing. And, you know, we're starting to talk about some cases now that have outlived their life. You know, they've been long settled. Do we how long do we really need to keep it? Did anyone validate that that's really the time frame to keep it? Let's double check and let's start to figure out, okay, let's start destroying things because we don't need it. That's just an ongoing thing and finding the time to do that is challenging. But if it comes down to finding a few hours to do that versus them taking the tool away from us because it's too expensive because the amount of data that we have is so much, I'd rather find, you know, an extra few hours, to to to start purging some data. But, it it's it's a constant thing that we're thinking about, because I'm not I'm not in the tool, but my team is. And, you know, when they tell me sometimes the magnitude of of documentation that we have and the terabytes of data that we have, I'm always like, do we really need all that? Because it makes me nervous. Yeah. I totally I don't say. I totally agree. I think that, you know, you that's that's sort of my point about the cost coming down is that, like, you can manage your own costs. Like, yes, there's licensing costs, but there's also that storage piece. Yeah. I think the other thing that I've learned getting involved in not just deep discovery budgeting, but budgeting for legal and, like, having to work with a partner is that, looking at other departments' budgets, legal's budget is not that big in comparison. Our asks are not that big in comparison to those departments and sort of putting those in perspective and sort of I think for the money you're spending, you're getting kind of a bigger bang for your buck than some other areas. And so that's another thing I think that I've been able to try to use as a tool to be like, let's put this in perspective. And it's been helpful. Right. I need to make just a comment and thinking right, Wendy, you're a litigation paralegal, so you probably understand this closely. When you're talking about data preservation and getting people to understand that they need to destroy, delete data that is no longer necessary, that are is either outside of that time scope or no longer on legal hold, getting them to understand the implications of maintaining data beyond that time frame because now you're at a litigation risk. Right. And that's really intangible to most people. Right? And I think and I think that in tech, we like to hold on to everything. Right? Like, source code lasts forever. You have change logs. Like, it's not the same as like, oh, who's gonna need these old drafts of regulatory filings we did to the FDA? And, like, we don't really need those. And and it's not a cut and dry. Right? Like, when you aren't regulated, it's actually a little bit harder to know what you need to keep and what you don't. So I kinda miss those days working in a regulated company sometimes. You each of you in one way or another have brought up security probably multiple times here. So it's clearly a major concern. And I think quite understandably so given the data that you're working with for ediscovery purposes. What should folks be looking at that, and what can they do to best protect the data that they are, charged with managing? Follow the workflows and the guidelines that are set by legal, I think, is the biggest thing for at least for me and my advice to folks, within my company is if you don't know, ask one of the attorneys to help you. And I think that that is something that some employees don't quite understand, or they don't feel comfortable maybe reaching out to an attorney and asking a question. But I encourage anyone that I speak with, especially those folks on legal hold that may or may not understand everything that's written in that legal hold. Ask the attorney. They will make sure you understand what you should be keeping and where should it be kept. Yeah. Mhmm. Do I'm sure everyone has seen employees put data, outside of, you know, the VPN or outside of OneDrive or SharePoint. And and, you know, any discovery, you just sit there and roll your eyes like, oh my gosh. Why would you ever do that? And then people don't understand that that is not a viable place to put, you know, source code that anyone can find. Right? You know? Yeah. I mean, I think it's so interesting because it's really institutional. Right? Like, if you you often need a program to help people understand why they're on legal hold, I think that's another big difference between, my past company and this company is that the litigation profile is pretty minimal, and I think we're looking for that. But because of that, people aren't really used to getting legal holds, and they get confused. And then they're like, what do I have to do? And so one of the things we've done is used things like ServiceNow and other areas and some of our homegrown AI tools to say if someone asks about a legal hold, take them here, take them there, take to this page. Here's an FAQ. We've reorganized our legal hold notices to be light on the subject, but the FAQ be heavy so that people understand, like, what are the questions that we're gonna get, and how can we explain this in a way that's not so much legally used, right, that we can bring it out for someone. The average person can understand. Yeah. Exactly. And so I think using and I'm using legal hold tools to, like, ask questions and surveys and whatever. You know, sometimes it feels invasive, and I think there's a lot of attorneys who don't want to act like don't wanna bombard people at the same time. The sooner you get that information and understand where things live, the easier life's gonna be. Yeah. For folks who've never gotten a legal hold notice, they panic sometimes. And what's funny is instead of going to the litigation team or to the attorney who maybe signed the legal hold, they'll all come running to me and they're just like, I didn't do anything. Yeah. You didn't have Don't think you did. That's not the point. It's okay. If you have anything regarding this subject, we're just asking you to preserve it. You know? And then I direct them to whoever the litigation attorney is, managing the case. But it really is funny to see people sort of go, oh my god. Get out. Like, relax. It's okay. When people argue with me about why they shouldn't be on. Yeah. Yeah. And be like, well, I'm not the right person for this. I'm like, did you do this, this, and this? Uh-huh. I think you are. Well, I don't have anything. Great. Then you don't have anything to do. Right. We are towards the acknowledge. Yeah. I'm gonna repeat this again. Click acknowledge. Just click acknowledge. Please. Exactly. But yeah. Some of those Yeah. That can be very, interesting. Yeah. I get that quite often, especially, from our retail stores. Well, I wasn't I I didn't work at that store at that time. No. But that's not what the legal hold said. Exactly. So just like that acknowledge button and and don't delete anything related to that topic. Can you just can you just go along with it? Like, just Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hear back. Exactly. Exactly. Before we before we turn it over to the q and a portion, I'd like to do a lightning round of final words of wisdom from each of you. And I'll give you a nanosecond or 2 or 3 to figure out what you want to say before I arbitrarily choose one of you and then a second and a third to give your final thoughts on this topic as I told you. I'll just see if you get a chance to think about what you want to say. And I think I'm gonna start with you, Wendy. I know you're gonna start with me. I feel like I have phrases. Data retention. It's important. Doing the work up front. Right? Not waiting till discovery starts, but doing a doing a really thorough job in the investigation phase when you get a new, litigation to really understand the issues and what should be preserved so that you're not taken by surprise later. Heather, how about you? I'll kind of ping on that too. My advice is to bring ediscovery in at the beginning of any matter that may or may not have any type of discovery requirements. Letting and bringing in the ediscovery team on the onset can help build what you may or may not need. May we are able to answer questions on the front end versus on the back end after things may have may have been deleted or you can't find them or the person is now gone. Bringing us in on the on the forefront tends to help legal matters because we know where's that data sits or we know who to reach out to. And we are also here to answer questions to outside counsel because they may or may not understand, our data map or who is the subject matter expert in a specific area, and we can assist. That we are very cost efficient. Yeah. That's a no. Okay. So, again, you know, I'm not the end user in my department, but, having having well trained staff that's knowledgeable about the risks, to not having the ediscovery tool and to also not utilizing it properly. So making sure that they are constantly training and understanding it and communicating so that when I'm asked at budget season to, you know, make a recommendation for keeping it or shopping for a new tool that I can speak intelligently and say, here's the success. Here's how much data we've processed. Here's how much we've actually saved in time and resources because we've had the ability to utilize this tool and we were able to mitigate some risk or, you know, things like that. Having bring showing the value of it, I think, is really where I come in. But making sure that everybody understands what the tool does and making sure that my team is on top of all of that was parameters. And then, again, retention. I think we're just gonna keep talking about it, making sure those data retention policies are out there, that you're communicating them. And when you see people not utilizing it the right way that you call them out for it. I like how you said value because I think people forget that, our group, that we provide value, not just to the legal department, but we add value to the entire company. Mhmm. Well, Adela, Wendy, other, thank you so much for joining us. And at this point now, I will hand the metaphorical microphone back over to Brandon who will take us into the QA section. Thank you. Thank you, George, Adela, Wendy, and Heather for your great presentation. Now let's go into the live q and a. And our first question, comes from Christina. Suggestions and thoughts on good ediscovery products that are out there. Happy to give plugs as long as, Reveal's okay with that. It may not include Reveal products. That's okay. One of the products that is Reveal is ONA. Dropbox has used ONA for almost, I think, over 4 years now. And it's really helped with number 1, collecting from Dropbox, but it collects from, I wanna say, 22 or 25 different sources. And it's relatively easy to use, especially if you don't if you're not if you're not a technical person or you don't have an IT background, it's it's pretty straightforward, and it's pretty flexible. So that is one. I think many of you know that Legal Hold Pro got acquired by Extero, and so we are personally navigating that transition and looking at Extero more closely. And that kinda goes to the at least my impression of Extero is that they've lowered some of their prices maybe or they've made things more affordable compared to the tool and how expensive I think they were previously. A new thing on the market is Zubu, z u b u, which is taking a different approach to legal hold notices and how you can manage things, kind of a mix of legal hold pro and maybe preservation at the same time. And another one that I've recently discovered, partly through reveal, is Mode 1, who is working on sort of a less intense version of imaging mobile devices, and that has really been eye opening. So those are kind of my top of mind vendors and softwares that I think are helping us the most. So for me, we're actually using a reveal tool. We're using logical. I didn't have a tool in place before. We were using our matter management system to issue, legal holds, and then our data was being housed, manually on servers. So, you know, I'm about 3 years in using the product. Everyone seems happy with it, but I certainly do get enough solicitations from a 1000 other companies that have similar products. I I will guess if I have not looked at any of the other ones, but you never know. Awesome. Our next question is, what emerging trends in data management could further complicate challenges in new discovery and how can we prepare for them? I'm reading the question to comprehend it. What emerging trends in data management? I don't know. That's a really open question, I think. I think it you know, AI creates its own, issues. Like, if do you list AI as a custodian? Like, are they a person? You know, that's just a new area. So, like, if you were using AI to create documents and you had some sort of automation, at your company and those documents are relevant to a legal hold or something else, I think that's sort of a new area. I think we talked a little bit about it in our session, but the competing, efforts related to GDPR and sort of legal preservation are unique as well. Yeah. I agree with that. I think that, AI is certainly going to have some challenges going forward, because everyone's using it differently. It's it's some of it's storing data, some of it's not. I think, ultimately, the ones who say they're not storing data probably are. It's just not easily accessible, so I think that may be an issue. And I think we mentioned it in the in the session on multiple devices. Right? So people can log in anywhere, anytime, and, you know, if everything is being used in the cloud, that's great. But if people are using products offline and now they have data stored on their personal laptops, you know, just sitting on the desktop, You know what you do. So Adding to the, AI part of it, I hear a growing number of questions about what is going to be done not just with the output of the AIs, generative AI, or is really what we're talking about here, I think. Not not just how are we gonna handle the output of those systems, but what is going to be done in terms of the prompts or instructions that are given excuse me, given to the systems. Are they kept? Are they not kept? How are they accessed? How do you make use of them? Whether it's for discovery purposes or or for any other purposes? And I hear questions, but I don't yet hear any good answers. Yeah. I don't think there are. And I think we're probably at least a year or 2 away from getting any real answers because until we have case law regulating this, you're gonna have to make a lot. Well, you know, opposing counsel is gonna have to make a lot of arguments about why it's relevant and, you know, what demands they made. To say this well, I mean, like, there's you kinda have to there's a lot of effort that has to go into showing, I think, improving that there's meaningful information there and it's relevant to litigation. And I think along those lines, to the extent that parties start litigating those issues, a litigation within litigation about the discovery of prompts, that has the possibility of bringing back to life what has largely died down which is that whole segment of litigation where there are the fights about, the discovery at a level that require retention of experts and Yep. Hugely increasing potentially the you know, cost of handling matters. Personally, I hope we don't end up going that route, but there is certainly the possibility of that. Mhmm. Awesome. For our next question, we have, what are some practical first steps for a legal team struggling with data overload to implement streamline data management strategies without disrupting current workflows? Take it up. Hold on. I don't know. I mean, is that from the from the legal hold perspective or just data in general? Because I think that goes back to the conversation we had about legal retention. Right? Making sure your retention policies are up to date and being applied, to manage your data. But if you're talking about legal holds where people are just pulling everything because they're afraid that they're gonna leave something out, that's a whole different question. Yeah. I agree. I think that if you're looking at the left side of the EDRM, we're talking about data retention and sort of a long term plan with that. FYI, those are gonna disrupt current workflows for those org members. But, the keep everything model or lose everything doesn't always work, so that's just an education piece. On the right side of the DRM of what you're collecting and sort of this data overload, I'd highly encourage people to use early case assessment tools and databases to be able to distill that data down. And those databases essentially take the metadata along with the OCR text without the images, which means it's less data and less processing, so less money. You can then narrow things down with search terms and things like that in relativity and then push what's actually relevant to the database that you want it to go to, and go from there. So that's what we've been doing is is, you know, sometimes we have these large buckets, especially when it comes to the g Suite, which has terrible searching mechanisms, involved. We've just are over inclusive, take it to ECA, and then distill it there. Awesome. For our next question, we have, can you provide guidance on developing a data retention policy that minimizes the risk of missing crucial evidence while avoiding data overload? So I could jump in here for from my perspective. We had our we had our legal department look at the data retention policy that was in place, and then it was spearheaded by our data privacy council. Mostly from a privacy perspective. We wanted to understand what, because we have a lot of customers, like, what customer data were we keeping and where are we keeping it and how is it being kept and how often is it being purged, that kind of thing. And that sort of snowballed into a larger project, which became sort of a company wide data retention policy. It it took probably close to a year to put something together and decipher it, out to everybody. If any chance we get illegal to promote that it's there for anyone's access access on the Internet site, we do that so that folks are taking some ownership of it. We don't wanna police it. That would be a full time job in itself, but, you know, we did take the the initiative in reviewing it, making sure that it was aligned with GDPR and other privacy, you know, rules and regulations, and then making sure that we were still staying in line with legal hold requirements. So that was carved into it. I can give a more simplistic answer, which is, talk to your outside counsel. Like, we use, SafePath, which SafePath has a specific ediscovery counsel, sort of as a side part of their firm. And when we're kind of stuck between, you know, here's what GDPR wants, or here's what privacy wants essentially, here is what we're concerned about from a litigation perspective, here's what the business wants, outside counsel can be really helpful in identifying what what are the laws, regulations, whatever related to this data that you need to be aware of and what sort of the litigation risk of either accommodating someone else or a short a short response, a long response. What does that look like? And then you can determine what's best for you as a company of what you're keeping. And they've been a really useful tool to be able to, like, kind of take a step back to be like, okay. Fine. Regulation says this. How often are we seeing these types of litigations? What what's the real risk here? Right? What's what's happening in the world, around these issues? And that can really kind of get you out of your own head of, like, what that risk may be. Three additional thoughts on this. One, this is a wonderful place to apply the KISS principle or keep it simple. The data retention policies get so complex and cumbersome that the people who are supposed to use them just throw up their arms and keep everything or keep nothing or do what they feel like doing. The to the extent the policies can be simple, straightforward, and easy to follow, that helps reduce both overkeeping and underkeeping of information. 2nd, you might think you've rolled out a great policy and program but unless you test it, you don't really know what's happening and unless you check regularly and test regularly, you don't know whether it's continuing to operate the way you want it to do to operate. 3rd, people are only going to be able to make effective use of the policy and program if they understand what it is and how to use it. Initial and ongoing education all are very helpful in this. Awesome. So we only have a couple of minutes left, so I wanna take this time to thank all of our wonderful presentations, presenters for taking time out of their day for this presentation and for answering our questions in the live q and a. To wrap up, we're gonna launch a quick 3 question survey. If you could please take the time to, 30 seconds to answer that survey, we would really appreciate it. And if you have any questions, further, please feel free to put them in the q and a section. And if you have any questions about Reveal or wanna see any of Reveal's products, please feel free to press the request a demo button in the top right hand side of your screen. And with that, thank you all for attending, and we'll conclude today's webinar. Thanks, everybody.