Peer to Peer Magazine

27 WWW.ILTANET.ORG BEST PRACTICES Skills You Need To Climb the Mountain of Data Challenges and costs of technology solutions offered and emerging innovations disrupting the status quo. Without a clear picture of how technology plays into IG, lawyers will continue to struggle in addressing security challenges. Counsel must also understand the limits of the technology being implemented and plan for how to navigate around those restrictions. Do not let perfect be the enemy of good. Take the time to prioritize requirements and implement solutions that address the biggest areas of risk. A global perspective. Data breaches are a global problem, and your firm must stay current on the latest regulations wherever it has operations. The passage of the EU directive on the Security of Network and Information Systems (NIS) requires companies operating in critical sectors to satisfy wide-reaching incident reporting obligations. This, coupled with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which allows fines of €20m or four percent of global turnover, is a reminder to global organizations that they need to evaluate their obligations and take steps to be ready when regulations come into force. Skills To Climb the Mountain We continue to see that the rapid evolution across the legal industry is being met with flexibility, creativity and innovation. Legal teams are acting nimbly in a changing environment and are working diligently to stay in front of data disasters. The successes — and the failures –– we read about in the headlines are shaping best practices for data security, IG and technology implementation. By building the skills and knowledge outlined above, practitioners will be beer equipped to climb the mountain of never-ending data challenges. P2P and compliance stakeholders to ensure you have appropriate fail-safes to help reinforce change. The widely accepted Koer Eight-Step Change Model can help with managing data challenges. Some of its key tenets include creating urgency, communicating the vision, identifying and eliminating obstacles, seing short-term realistic goals that foster a sense of achievement among those involved and making changes permanent by solidifying adoption and addressing opposition head on. A sense of when to call in reinforcements. Outside experts can help guide IG efforts and identify weak points in the overall compliance structure, so know when to call on them. The IG professional must also evaluate these outside providers and be familiar with what to expect from them. The experts' findings not only inform stakeholders of needed improvements, they could also help sway reluctant executives to invest the needed time and money into these efforts. Holding outside providers accountable to budget estimates, timelines, deliverables and security standards will go a long way toward ensuring initiatives meet internal benchmarks. A knowledge of sound budgeting practices. There is an ongoing industry-wide struggle to control e-discovery and other data-related costs. Knowing how to achieve budget predictability is a critical skill that can have a lasting effect on the success of any maer. As the industry matures, more lawyers are turning to master service agreements to negotiate alternative billing models and achieve greater budget predictability. Another way to control budgets is to recognize the ways technology can affect the time and cost of a project. Sophisticated legal teams are using analytics and predictive coding to identify sensitive information for IG purposes or to uncover key facts for legal or regulatory maers. This helps reduce the time spent wading through large volumes of information, reducing overall costs. A solid grasp on technology capabilities and limitations. Technology provides a variety of solutions to assist in geing data under control. When kicking off any initiative to address data security, remediation, preservation optimization or modernizing storage, the wise professional will become educated on the range SONIA CHENG As Senior Director at FTI Consulting, Sonia Cheng leads information governance initiatives for FTI's technology practice group, helping organizations deal with the challenges associated with exploding data volumes and complying with complex global regulations. Sonia has deep experience in transformation and change across related disciplines in e-discovery, records management, archiving and storage optimization. Contact her at sonia.cheng@fticonsulting.com. The ability to translate security requirements into operations requires a holistic approach involving people, process and technology.

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