Part 4 of Ari Kaplan’s annual GC Report sponsored by Relativity and FTI Technology has good survey metrics and better quotes from 60 legal department leaders.  Download the free reports to read Ari’s excellent perspectives. I pulled a couple quotes to comment on below. Legal department transformation from incident response to proactive risk management. The approach shift from reactive to proactive was most clearly signaled by the 160% increase in respondents reporting rise in compliance monitoring vs. the 2023 survey. I saw a distinct change in GC attitudes emerging from the Pandemic Pau ..read more

Copilot’s retrieval capabilities may tempt disgruntled, departing or politically devious employees to fire off prompts for sensitive pricing lists, salaries, roadmaps and other corporate data jewels not secured appropriately. Copilot effectively empowers EVERY employee with a smart eDiscovery search tool. The key to managing this risk is a mature, flexible M365 group security program. Easier said than done. Security and investigators can access user Copilot interactions from the compliance audit portal and eDiscovery. Since these actions are logged, they are subject to monitoring rules and pol ..read more

Microsoft announced that they have conquered unified cloud storage and migrated all of your M365 ESI to a secured, secret Syntex Alternative Reality Services platform that contains all of mankind’s ESI. This unified information pool has catalyzed the first General Artificial Intelligence code named AZURENET. Your M365 tithes will be increasing to match your income and your personal CoPilot will have your calendar completely booked with Teams meetings. It will generate all of your agendas, notes and tasks, even if you do not understand them. Just keep taking your blue pill and everything will r ..read more

I gently declined to cover multiple recent c-suite appointments because I could not answer my “Why should you care?” query. When reviewed en masse, the executive shuffling points to some interesting eDiscovery market trends. Below are some 2024 executive appointments with some of their prior companies. This was an fast query (and  neither Copilot or Gemini were helpful), so it will be incomplete. My first takeaway is that eDiscovery companies are maturing and investing in operations, people and customers. These investments are not sexy like CEO or CIO swaps, but they signal a retrenchment ..read more

The ‘preserve broadly, collect narrowly’ eDiscovery approach has a hidden cost. It delays your ‘time to truth’ by a year in most cases. It robs counsel of key facts and evidence hidden in custodial in-place holds. M365, Google and other cloud repositories now have search and basic eDiscovery features to validate interviews. How many times have reviewers stumbled onto conflicting documents, reports or messages while trying to beat the looming production deadline? Why agree to a discovery plan without knowing what could come back to bite you? A few possible historical causes: Very few civil mat ..read more

How do you keep up with our rapidly evolving eDiscovery world? Are bloggers (content creators) valuable in our GenAI world? An article by Joan Westenberg titled Curation is the last best hope of intelligent discourse answered my existential angst with marvelous clarity. First the problem space: “The current state of AI technology lacks the nuanced understanding and ethical judgment necessary to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the content it produces.” My translation: AI can generate well formed information without understanding the meaning or impact of that information. Predictive AI can ..read more

Casepoint has rolled out FOIA and Legal Hold modules to solve government and corporate pain points. The key value I see is the deep integration of complex task management workflows with the underlying eDiscovery platform. I have seen many tracking systems for FOIA, DSAR and other external information requests. Few integrate both repositories (M365, Google, Box, etc.) and eDiscovery platforms. Similarly, most Legal Hold systems provide notifications, custodian portal and can trigger in-place preservation, but few support ECA and scoping functionality that is critical to place defensible select ..read more

Supreme Court politics aside, the lingering metadata demonstrates the potential a risk and value of editorial metadata embedded within documents that have not been ‘scrubbed’ prior to production. Even when revision history has been disabled, legal hold or retention policies may create unlimited versions based on Auto-Save settings. Using Save A Copy may retained older version history.  Revision history in SharePoint defaults to 500 versions, which become unlimited when under hold. As you can see from Mark Joseph Stern’s excellent speculations, a savvy counsel may be able to paint a plausi ..read more

eDiscovery has grown up. That was my first thought when I saw the manned Microsoft booth at Legal Week. Google and Amazon have yet to really engage with legal, compliance and governance markets. To be fair, my friend Jack Halprin delivered the Google Vault back in 2012, but it seems to have gone quiet since his passing in 2018. The Microsoft legal department and eDiscovery (now Purview) team have spoken on partner panels and taken Legal Week briefings for over a decade. The 2024 marks the first sign that Microsoft acknowledges the influencer role of legal in enterprise licensing decisions. Mic ..read more

Click to view full size As Mike McBride recently reported, M365 Purview(Premium) is rolling out a new aggregate report for legal hold locations. It finally arrived at my testing tenant. Unfortunately, it did not restore hold item counts, which I and my corporate clients have been requesting since they vanished from the Compliance Center. So what does the new report show and how can you leverage it? The report aggregates all your individual holds from across your Premium and Standard matters. It lists the case, hold name (important for PShell queries), location and policy status (application ..read more