The Pandemic continues to change how we communicate, do business and manage our lives. Teams and Zoom video meetings from our home offices are the new business casual. Invitations to webinars, vblogs, online classes and conferences fill our feeds. A quick search for eDiscovery webinars in the last three weeks yielded 4,290 hits. Marketing and sales executives are franticly creating online video content that [...]
2020 was a write off for many in the eDiscovery market. Client initiatives held or cancelled outright while the judiciary granted mass continuances as they struggled with the transition to remote hearings. Many of my long-term clients issued work stoppages that lasted more than six months. 2021 arrived carrying all those backlogged matters and projects. After a few quarters scrambling to catch up and [...]
Over the decades I have driven far too many defensible deletion, classification or similar initiatives aimed at removing the ROT from corporate local, network and cloud data stores. I have wondered many times whether these were Sisyphean tasks even as I generated ROI estimates based on data reduction to justify the technology and labor costs. Most of these projects achieved tangible short term corporate [...]
The Obscenity list was one of the first automatic classification lists my team built into our Summation databases back in the bad old Enron days. We were one of the first defendants forced to search and review native raw email from the Exchange journal. Energy traders had filthy mouths and it was an easy way to spot heightened emotions. We also learned to route [...]
Microsoft and Google are busy re-inventing how knowledge workers collaborate. Many of us have stumbled onto complex sets of interdependent Excel workbooks being shared by accounting, sales and other teams. With good chain-of-custody procedures, I have reconfigured environments so that counsel or experts could manually review these ‘semi-structured’ file sets to extract potentially relevant snapshots. The breadth of sources simultaneously touched by Teams and [...]
Apple plans to start scanning all U.S. iPhones for images of child sexual abuse using a tool called “neuralMatch” or “NeuralHash” against a database of known images. Womble Dickinson’s JDSupra article covers many of the high-level privacy concerns and explores Apple’s plans for a service that will scan encrypted messages for sexually explicit content to provide parental notice. Using a generated hash to check [...]
Just a quick update as MSFT continues to consolidate storage architectures and change defaults. Per Roadmap 84580 this change will be rolled out next month. I rarely see legal holds issued for meetings that occurred within the last 2 months, so conservative or regulated companies should extend the default retention period for TMRs to match your current base retention period. I am sure that [...]
The recent raft of spoliation sanctions like Iacovacci v. Brevet Holdings, LLC seem to share fundamental misunderstandings around where key decision communications resided and how to preserve them. Broadly worded legal hold notices do indeed usually cover text and chat messages. Rarely do they convey practical instructions on preservation. In my opinion, these informal communication channels were once viewed as ‘non-records’ and avoided by [...]
Have your held Teams recordings or transcripts vanished after 21 days? There is an explanation, though I feel like I am stuck in an M365 eDiscovery issue rut. Really, I would like to be writing about more positive topics. This one popped up outside my usual eDiscovery testing while working with a new tech startup that heavily leverages recordings/transcripts for customer research, feature stories [...]
M365 Teams collections are already challenging corporate eDiscovery and provider teams with hidden SharePoint and OneDrive sites. Today’s Major Change Update Notification (MC261534 - reproduced at end for non-admins) covers the June-July roll out of Roadmap ID 81945 that dramatically expands custodian’s ability to associate existing/other Teams sites and automatically create private channel sites. More importantly, non-admin custodians are losing the ability to manually [...]