Digital White Papers

I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | L I T I G A T I O N A N D P R A C T I C E S U P P O R T 42 and tightly aligned with Security and Privacy will allow the organization to take advantage of the many years of experience that the litigation ediscovery and information governance programs have developed to manage data — wherever it lives. The Cost of Litigation and the Imperative of Information Governance The rise of information governance as a legal parent position over ediscovery took nearly a decade to manifest as common practice in many companies and firms. The concept of information governance as a corollary to ediscovery took hold in the mid- 2000s, as corporations and big law contended with the incredible costs of managing electronic data. Litigation spend hit astronomical levels and even to this day, ediscovery fees can occasionally eclipse even the cost of attorney time on certain matters. Corporations slowly evolved to organically mitigate expensive litigation ediscovery costs by integrating "information governance" efforts, which took the form of data mapping, classification, records disposition, preservation, and collections. The ROI for such information governance programs could be quantified — albeit painstakingly — through bottom line savings in litigation spend, data center storage reductions, and tape backups dispositions. The savings can also be qualified through softer benefits like operational improvements, fluid scale, and risk reductions, particularly in departments where the information governance controls were needed. Many of the tools available in the mid-2000s for enterprise document management, indexing, cataloguing, collection, classification, processing, and review required significant professional services, tool specific subject matter expertise, and were notoriously clunky to utilize and integrate. Despite the limitations in the tools, practitioners provided feedback on the shortcomings and value propositions, which helped drive improvements and soon gave rise to "Legal AI" through predictive coding, continuous active learning, indexing-in-place, self-service review/processing tools, and overall better user experience. This cornucopia of product enhancements kept ediscovery and information governance programs on pace with a booming and diverse enterprise technolo landscape. Security Matters More and more, corporations started bringing ediscovery and information governance programs in-house to save costs, shuffling resources from IT to Legal or otherwise blending the two workstreams in some way. Around 2010, the rise of shocking, newsworthy corporate data breaches — reputation damaging tales of leaked credit card information, credentials, and all manner of compromised personal data — unleashed heightened scrutiny against a corporate function that had otherwise flown under the radar: Security. The subsequent focus on improving corporate security programs necessitated heavy investments in generating standards, programs, talent, training, and tools to up-level existing policies and procedures, network monitoring, incident response, application security, compliance (e.g., SOCII, PCI-DSS), enterprise risk management frameworks, and better security provisions in contracts. Security naturally dovetailed with ediscovery, given that a large part of corporate ediscovery involves forensic collections, regardless of whether the collection is required due to a security incident or legal matter. Security naturally dovetailed with ediscovery, given that a large part of corporate ediscovery involves forensic collections, regardless of whether the collection is required due to a security incident or legal matter. T H E E V O L V I N G I D E N T I T Y O F C O R P O R A T E E D I S C O V E R Y A N D I N F O R M A T I O N G O V E R N A N C E

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