Part 4 of Ari Kaplan’s annual GC Report sponsored by Relativity and FTI Technology has good survey metrics and better quotes from 60 legal department leaders. Download the free reports to read Ari’s excellent perspectives. I pulled a couple quotes to comment on below.
Legal department transformation from incident response to proactive risk management.
The approach shift from reactive to proactive was most clearly signaled by the 160% increase in respondents reporting rise in compliance monitoring vs. the 2023 survey. I saw a distinct change in GC attitudes emerging from the Pandemic Pause of 2020. GC’s and non-litigation counsel are now interested in leveraging technology further upstream for shorter ‘Time to Truth’ to steal a pithy phrase from Kelly Twigger. They now want to understand and use the completely new generation of enterprise compliance capabilities delivered by Microsoft Purview.
…most aligned to several categories of best practices, including reliance on external experts and counsel for specialist issues…
Once upon a time I built an internal team of experts to manage some of the Enron investigations and subsequent crisis discovery. After everything finally settled, I realized that most corporate legal departments do not need full-time top experts. I departed to make eDiscovery tools and recommended downsizing my team to meet the steady state discovery requirements. Most global corporations have independent expert consultants like myself or the Redgrave Data team on call for difficult cases, new AI technologies and to keep up with the ever-changing ESI landscape.
A peer in the Netherlands added, “Legal has become so much more specialized that we are relying on external service providers because you cannot do it all in-house.”
This quote was fabulous affirmation for my crusade against $/GB case budgets in favor of long term managed service partners supporting enterprise licensed eDiscovery platforms such as Relativity, Reveal, CasePoint, Exterro and others. I always advocated that my clients should own the platform license with the support of their firm’s favorite PMs and admins to provide the burst capacity to meet production deadline sprints.
I hope that I added some useful perspectives. eDiscovery and InfoGov times, technologies and caselaw are rapidly changing. It takes a community to track them all.
Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.
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