When is a business chat a record? That question has plagued my consulting practice since I first collected and processed native email for a client back in 1993. Now your policies, protocols and security controls have to address multiple chat apps that support ‘vapormail’ disappearing messages. WhatsApp adds this capability to over 2 BILLION users. When you add FaceBook, Instagram, Signal, Viber and WeChat [...]
The article is a long and rather scholarly coverage of the evolution of the communication privilege. It brings up a couple interesting issues for retention policies and classification systems. First is the need to retain the actual communication wrapper for legal work product to preserve privilege. The proliferation of online meetings, chat and collaboration channels are generally considered informal communications and not addressed by [...]
We are living in an age of unprecedented layoffs, work stoppages, downsizing, and general unemployment. I frequently call out weak corporate termination policies/protocols during discovery health assessments. It is a complicated process with many players, data sources and heightened emotions. Most people hate confrontations or making a scene. Any fuzziness in your separation protocols may result in former employees walking away with corporate data [...]
Session workflow or check list to review separation of employment policies and protocols from a discovery readiness perspective. This is not actual policies or protocols. Instead, it is an extended bullet list of separation scenarios to consider and decision elements that your policies/protocols should cover. Every work environment has unique data systems, business models, risks and corporate cultures that must be considered when developing [...]
Epiq’s “Ruyk” ransomware attack in February cut off customer access to their hosted discovery matters for roughly three days. This outages constitutes a major service interruption and violation of normal Service Level Agreements for one of the largest global legal service providers. Beyond SLA penalties, missed production deadlines and unhappy customers, Epiq is now facing a potential class action suit under the new California [...]
How long should you keep ad hoc internal communications? That is the question that bubbled up while listening to the four Big Tech CEO’s trying to explain a few of their 1.3 million emails and internal documents obtained by the House Antitrust Subcommittee's investigation that kicked off June 2019. The vast majority of those exhibits dated from 2010-2012 M&A strategy discussions. We have no [...]
The headline got me excited that this new MSFT O365 package might enable my clients to better monitor policy and data management compliance. The reality seems pretty weak. Agentless monitoring of desktop and MS Edge actions such as downloads, forwards to banned domains, etc. We have been able to see those in logs for years and to create custom log based alerts. The new [...]
Back at LTNY in February I put the word out that I was going to relaunch eDiscoveryJournal.com. I pushed back briefings, webinars and interview requests with the “when it is live” excuse. When Joe Bartolo and Bard Schaffel asked to interview me for their EDRM podcast series, I ‘thought’ that surely I would have the new site live by then. So most of you [...]