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 will reach potential customers who do not have time to read white papers. Educators are adapting their curriculum and content to leverage online whiteboards like Miro, interactive chat, resource repositories and other tools for remote learning. Pre-pandemic video meetings tended to be formal affairs between upper management whose time constraints outweighed travel time. Now I feel strange in old school conference calls, missing my client’s facial feedback. This deluge of video content challenges infrastructure, privacy, compliance and eDiscovery policies and capabilities.
Frankly, most organizations are not ready to manage these massive MP4 files and all the associated files and secondary communication streams. Microsoft has rebuilt the Stream video service and is migrating Teams video storage to accommodate the dramatic increase. I supported client interim decisions to ban/block video recordings and transcripts when their corporate workforces went remote. Outright bans on any new technology are almost always a temporary coping mechanism to buy IT-compliance-legal time to support legitimate business usage. Microsoft, Zoom, Google and other video conference platforms have spawned a host of products that capture and enhance all that video content. Knowledge workers are increasingly hungry for tools to see what matters and do more with it.
Corporate IG stakeholders must balance the risks and cost of these new multichannel media streams against the business value of their content. That requires more that increasing your SharePoint/OneDrive storage. Revised privacy, security and usage policies will need effective controls and training to support employees exploring these new capabilities. Changing corporate culture takes time and top-down commitment to conquer the initial ‘wild west’ of a new communication resource. The good news is that many eDiscovery providers now have real development departments that have shortened the lag time for processing, analysis and review of new ESI types. Even better, the principal source platforms (Microsoft and Google) have real API’s that enable direct access by those providers. We are slowly getting closer to real universal data compatibility and access. Video content is now more than just depo transcripts. It is potential evidence that must be preserved, collected and otherwise part of your eDiscovery lifecycle. How do you manage video content? Even better, how does your eDiscovery tech handle it? I want to hear about it.
Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Contact him directly for a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.
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Excellent and timely article, thanks! I’m curious if any companies are setting a policy around remote/video meetings that states they will not retain a copy of the video, but will retain notes on the meeting according to retention requirements. That would mirror the “old way” of conducting meetings with meeting notes as the official record, and avoid some of the huge and sometimes controversial new discovery issues such as having facial expressions available, or nodding/shaking heads and other reactions. Then there is the similar issue: What about meetings held remotely but participants refuse to keep a copy of the video,… Read more »