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 [...]
Back in 2004, Exterro and PSS Atlas were the only COTS data map solutions in the eDiscovery market. For decades they have relied on data source owners to enter or update the record entries. I have helped clients build scheduled imports from IT asset and other systems. I have no idea how these two products have survived 16 years without the ability to scan [...]
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 [...]
With a majority of our key employees working remotely via Zoom meetings, conference calls and various chat platforms Microsoft has just added automatic transcription functionality to user’s online Word application. This functionality enables users to convert previously recorded or live audio into a pretty good transcript that differentiates between speakers and has an associated xml file with the segment times. Tech savvy users have [...]
Having supported far too many FCPA investigations over the last 30 years, the hardest initial step is untangling the key employees, contractors, agents and foreign players involved in doing business overseas. The TGC article provides a solid checklist for compliance defensibility that many corporate clients would shy away from because of the heavy manual overhead required. Most enterprise content management systems now include categorization/tagging [...]
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 [...]
The relatively low rate of COVID-19 work safety lawsuits is not surprising while we are in the midst of the pandemic. I expect an inevitable surge in personal injury advertisements after we have an effective treatment or vaccine. “Were you or a loved one infected at work? Let the tough, smart lawyers at Acme Firm fight for your fair compensation!” I am not saying [...]
An old client gave me a good karma call (otherwise known as free consulting). She wanted my thoughts on how they could minimize the potential litigation and discovery cost of the inevitable workers comp and personal injury claims after employees contracted Covid-19 after returning to in person work. The best safety, sanitation and social distancing work practices will only minimize how rapidly or widely [...]