A monumental change has been experienced across all businesses. A quick chat is disrupted with the odd silence. The picture of the colleague who sits next to you is occasionally pixelated, sometimes frozen. An email is a text, a passed note pings.
Be it for 12 weeks or longer - the digital era is upon us.
2019 saw many law firms working on ‘agile’ projects that focussed on enabling employees to work from multiple locations and devices but 2020 is likely to ask a different question - how ‘agile’ is your data.
On 31 January 2020 the UK will formally adopt the withdrawal agreement and commence preparations for leaving the EU a year later. With all the talk surrounding the various scenarios that could happen, it is useful to look at the potential effect on data transfer and what that might mean for organisations and their IT systems.
How Emotionally Intelligent AI is Changing eDiscovery
There’s no denying that machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are transforming every facet of our lives. We regularly speak with automated customer service representatives and see ads on our Facebook feeds that were chosen specifically for us by AI-powered technology. The eDiscovery industry is being impacted by this new technology as well. Machine learning and AI are becoming crucial to the discovery process, quickly sifting through massive amounts of data so that legal teams can locate relevant information and make quick and accurate review calls.
In any eDiscovery or investigation review, the challenge is to find the responsive (and often only the responsive) documents to meet production deadlines and your legal obligations. Review teams must also quickly adapt to unforeseen changes in review criteria, be vigilant in protecting privileged and other sensitive information from disclosure, and be as efficient as possible for your client.
The first part of this article can be read here.
All businesses must abide by certain general and industry-specific rules and regulations, whether that’s regulatory frameworks like HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and FACTA (Fair and Accurate Credit Transaction Act) or privacy-related regulations such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act). The Office 365 Security and Compliance Center can assist with those needs as well.
Employees across every department at large and medium companies in the U.S. use several key software applications every day to be productive and manage their job duties – applications such as email, chat, calendar, spreadsheets and document sharing systems. Most of those companies, including most of our corporate and law firm clients, today use Microsoft’s subscription service, Office 365 (O365), which makes sense, as it is the most widely adopted cloud service with more than 180 million users.
Open source software (OSS) – some of the best, cleanest, and most secure code in use today – permeates project development at every level. Because of its widespread use, legal counsel will encounter it in almost any business.
While OSS is often free in price, it is never free from obligations. The security risk that open source software creates isn’t that the code is likely to be problematic. The greater risk is that you won’t know where you use it – which means that you won’t know where to patch it. How can your organization ensure that it uses OSS properly and takes proper precautions with it?
Gottfried Leibniz, one of the ‘grandfathers of artificial intelligence’, was, amongst other things, a lawyer. And despite dying some 300 years ago, he was clear on the benefits that AI could bring to the legal industry, stating: “It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.”
One of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) key strategic initiatives has been the development of clear guidelines to help organizations manage cybersecurity-related risk. A growing number of U.S. federal agencies have adopted this cybersecurity framework for purposes of securing their systems and their third-party contractors’ systems as well.
For many law firms, digital transformation is now a key business priority that requires immediate resolution; 100% of top 10 law firms and 40% of top 11-25 firms have identified technology as the key challenge to growth in the next 2 years1. And 85% of enterprise decision-makers stated they have a two-year period to make significant inroads into digital transformation or they will fall behind their competitors and suffer financially2.
Did you already hear about the 90 Days LegalTech Challenge? An interesting initiative by Ana Alvarez, a Columbian lawyer and legal innovation enthusiast.
The Challenge aims to raise awareness about innovative, customer centric and empathic LegalTech solutions.
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