By John Patzakis and Charles Meier CIOs and legal and compliance executives often aspire to implement information governance programs like defensible deletion, data migration, and data audits to detect risks and remediate non-compliance. However, without an actual and scalable technology platform to effectuate these goals, those aspirations remain just that. Many CIOs attempt to address this daunting challenge by migrating disparate data from around the global enterprise into a central location. However, they quickly find that such attempts to “boil the ocean” are extremely expensive, highly ..read more

By Larry Gill Since I joined the X1 team last year as CEO, I have made it my priority to double down on our support and expansion of our X1 Social Discovery solution. To that end, I am excited to announce that we have just launched version 7 of X1 Social Discovery, social media and web collections solution, which includes a new cutting-edge Instagram connector, along with our revamped Facebook support, where all our users now have native post-level collection and parsing to ensure accuracy, key metadata collection, court authentication, and evidentiary completeness of the collected data. Noth ..read more

By John Patzakis It is prediction season for trends in the eDiscovery space for 2023. While many good eDiscovery scribes have published their prognostications in recent days, the annual predictions and overall analysis from Doug Austin in eDiscovery Today are invariably insightful. As a top industry analyst, Austin is in constant contact with eDiscovery executives and professionals and thus has a good finger on the industry pulse. One of his key predictions this year, which notably appears in several trending 2023 forecasts, centers around the upstream focus on information governance and targ ..read more

By John Patzakis Enterprises today are creating and storing massive volumes of unstructured, data distributed across the enterprise at a very fast pace. IT experts refer to this data type as “dark data.” Research advisory firm Gartner defines dark data as “the information assets organizations collect, process and store during regular business activities, but generally fail to use for other purposes.” according to Rahul Telang, professor of information systems at Carnegie Mellon University, “[o]ver 90% of the data in business is dark data.” Dark data exists due to organizational silos and a hi ..read more

By John Patzakis Recent research from industry analyst Greg Buckles at the eDiscovery Journal highlights soaring valuations for eDiscovery tech firms.  For the first time in the history of the industry, multiple eDiscovery tech firms have gone public in a single year, and by my count, there are at least seven tech “Unicorns” (a company with at least a billion dollar valuation) in the space. Relativity leads the way with at least a $3.6 billion valuation based upon their latest financing. Yet while technology-based providers are seeing escalating valuations, valuations and M&A activit ..read more

By Michael Rasmussen Editor’s note: Today we are featuring a guest blog post from Michael Rasmussen, the GRC Pundit & Analyst at GRC 20/20 Research, LLC. Exponential growth and change in business strategy, risks, regulations, globalization, distributed operations, competitive velocity, technology, and business data encumbers organizations of all sizes. Gone are the years of simplicity in business operations. Managing the complexity of business from a legal and privacy perspective, governing information that is pervasive throughout the organization, and keeping continuous business and lega ..read more

By Michael Rasmussen Editor’s note: Today we are featuring a guest blog post from Michael Rasmussen, the GRC Pundit & Analyst at GRC 20/20 Research, LLC. At its core, GRC is the capability to reliably achieve objectives [GOVERNANCE], address uncertainty [RISK MANAGEMENT], and act with integrity [COMPLIANCE]. GRC is something organizations do, not something they purchase. They govern, they manage risk, and they comply with obligations. However, there is technology to enable GRC to enable GRC related processes, such as legal and privacy, to be more efficient, effective, and agile. However ..read more

An earlier version of this article appeared on Legaltech News By John Patzakis A core requirement of both the GDPR and the similar California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which becomes enforceable on July 1, is the ability to demonstrate and prove that personal data is being protected. This requires information governance capabilities that allow companies to efficiently identify and remediate personal data of EU and California residents. For instance, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) provides that “The GDPR places a high expectation on you to provide information in ..read more

By John Patzakis The vital global effort to contain the COVID-19 pandemic will likely disrupt our lives and workflows for some time. While our personal and business lives will hopefully return to normal soon, the trend of an increasingly remote and distributed workforce is here to stay. This “new normal” will necessitate relying on the latest technology and updated workflows to comply with legal, privacy, and information governance requirements. From an eDiscovery perspective, the legacy manual collection workflow involving travel, physical access and one-time mass collection of custodian lapt ..read more

By John Patzakis The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is now in effect, but many organizations have not fully implemented compliance programs. For many organizations, one of the top challenges is complying with the GDPR’s tight 72-hour data breach notification window. Under GDPR article 33, breach notification is mandatory where a data breach is likely to “result in a risk for the rights and freedoms of individuals.” This must be done within 72 hours of first having become aware of the breach.  Data processors will also be required to notify their customers, the controll ..read more