Annual survey and interview cycles take on a life of their own. The year over year insights into the perspectives and concerns of corporate GC help us understand where the market and our own careers are headed. My thanks to Ari Kaplan for all the hard work and clean data. It helps to put 2024-2025 in perspective. The 2020 Pandemic Pause was an unprecedented [...]
Have you been buried managing matters and had little time to keep up with the avalanche of new eDiscovery caselaw? The wicked smart team at eDiscovery Assistant have assembled a 50-page report covering the key trends above. I forwarded many of these cases to my clients when they have potential impact to outdated policies or changing court expectations. One on-point sanction decision can convince [...]
Reading the actual Patent (US 12,069,151 B2) provides a much clearer picture if you can wade through the rather obtuse patent legalese. It seems clear that this method applies to an enterprise server based patform rather than a SaaS service. They patent and Cellebrite’s handy ‘fact page’ carefully state that remote collection requires device owner notification and consent. I have encountered this same hesitation [...]
A global corporate compliance officer recently told me, “They do all the bad things on their phones.” While remote mobile device collection products entered the market a few years ago, initial utilization and case studies seem to have been dominated by big, complex ‘bet the company’ matters. This kind of long-term strategic integration partnership better supports corporate legal-compliance workflows where automation, dashboards and [...]
If you do not follow Kelly Twigger’s newsletter and/or the eDiscovery Assistant service, you should. She gives us excellent analysis and on point commentary on this case highlights the complexities of mobile device (especially BYOD devices) preservation obligations and early preservation strategies. I have struggled with global enterprise clients to get them to understand how important critical ‘ad hoc’ mobile chat communications can [...]
Doug Austin and Prosearch have been covering Recall privacy concerns. It is not surprising that the local Recall database is hackable. Many forensic peers would call that an ‘accessibility feature’ for discovery scenarios. Will savvy plaintiff counsel add language to their demand letters requiring Recall enablement and content preservation for key custodians in scenarios with ongoing behavior issues? This is essentially user ephemeral data. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I rarely comment on M&A outside of eDiscovery market, but as a former Symantec-Veritas PM alumni I track the fate of my former products and peers. To put this in context, Carlyle Group paid $7.4 billion for Veritas in 2016. Veritas revenue and share price have stumbled recently, which may explain the massive drop in value. Underneath what looks like a fire sale is [...]
Stephanie Wilkin’s collection of e-Discovery predictions is a good read. I like how David Cohen called out the pricing elephant in the corner and laid out a potential path to success for providers. The best expensive solution will lose market share to it’s more accessible competitor every time. I wish that I had Ryan Hemmel’s confidence in the speed of M365 Purview adoption by [...]