Industry Trends
Blog Post
Survey Finds Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Spending is on the Rise in Financial Sector
In the financial services sector, organizations are now spending an average of $176.4 million per year on their blockchain and cryptocurrency projects. According to a recent survey of industry decision makers that our team commissioned, investments are largely fueled by an overwhelming confidence in the success of blockchain and cryptocurrency projects and belief in the positive benefits they will bring to businesses, governments and consumers.
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Competition Authorities Increase Data Scrutiny in Technology Industry Transactions
Innovation within the technology industry was essentially the genesis for data as we know it today. Ironically, data within technology corporations is now positioned to become the centre of some of the most intense competition scrutiny and enforcement on record.
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Preparing for Increased Dawn Raid Activity in the U.K. and Europe
Authorities across the U.K. and Europe have indicated plans to step up oversight and enforcement across a range of regulations, particularly in the area of antitrust. This effort is already proving to include a surge in dawn raids—unannounced inspection by a regulator on suspicion of infringement—throughout 2022. In the months and year ahead, organisations will be under intensifying pressure to prepare for these inspections. This is prompting a renewed need for legal and compliance teams to review procedures and develop clearer understanding of their IT landscape so they can quickly respond to an inspector during an unannounced investigation.
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2022 Forecast: A Roundup of Predictions Across Governance and Expanding Risk
In FTI Technology’s and Relativity’s The General Counsel Report 2022, 60% of general counsel indicated worry over mounting risks, and said that their risk landscape is expanding or becoming more difficult to navigate in areas spanning compliance, regulatory enforcement, data privacy, information security, emerging data sources and ongoing effects from the pandemic. Feelings of preparedness dropped from the previous year in every major category discussed.
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The General Counsel Report 2022: Leading with Endurance While Facing Mounting Risks
Over the last three years, FTI Technology and Relativity have charted the continually shifting and expanding role of general counsel through an annual survey-driven report. In this year’s study, The General Counsel Report 2022, the role of the GC is analyzed with the understanding that the widening risk landscape has permanently expanded the role, demanding endurance from today’s corporate legal leaders.
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The General Counsel Report 2022
Previous General Counsel studies revealed that the trials from the past two years were critical in preparing legal teams with the endurance needed to face a myriad of emerging expectations and challenges. In this year’s GC Report, we explore three critical areas that will soon dominate time and resources: risk, culture and technology.
Blog Post
It’s been a year of milestones for the legal operations profession. More legal departments are prioritizing the legal operations role and function, adding head count in this area and supporting legal operations professionals with buy-in for their key initiatives. More, technology modernization within the legal department has sped up substantially over the last year, with legal operations often as a driving force behind the roll-out of new tools and processes.
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Law Department Operations Technology Survey: The Journey to Modernization
The pandemic has impacted us all in many ways. For some, it has meant pausing, reassessing priorities and charting a course for the future. The same can be said of businesses, and the legal departments within. To better understand the changes sought by law departments to increase efficiency through technology, FTI Consulting partnered with the Blickstein Group to conduct a study analyzing the road to technology modernization.
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With New Second Request Reforms, FTC Lays Heavier Hand on Competition Control
Last week, the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition issued a blog post detailing its new plans to make the Second Request process “more streamlined and more rigorous.” The changes—five specific and sweeping reforms to existing Second Request practices as well as plans to revise the current Model Second Request—come in response as the Commission aims to handle a record-number of merger requests and an increase in potentially anti-competitive deals.
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Global Insights: Bridging the Privacy Generation Gap in Australia
Studies and surveys show that most young people care very much about privacy and how data about them is collected and used. In our experience of advising clients on how to build privacy into their products and services, we’ve seen firsthand that when businesses don’t invest in understanding their users (including younger demographics), trust (and revenue, by extension) can quickly dissolve.
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GCR Survey Report: Investigations, Data and Compliance
The pandemic and its ripple effects have impacted us all in many ways, including how we work. Suddenly, millions of workers worldwide made the shift to remote work - adopting new schedules, communication systems, and business practices. Antitrust practitioners were no different.
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How to Generate Efficiencies in Your Legal Operations
Legal operations professionals are continually asked to do more with less — while maintaining legal department productivity and empowering in-house counsel. Not an easy task. In today’s rapidly shifting legal and data landscape, meeting in-house efficiency demands means having a thoroughly aligned and implemented technology roadmap.
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Beyond the Pandemic: EMEA Data and Discovery Roundtable
One year on from COVID, the risks resulting from long-term work from home environments and economic troubles have been widely discussed—and felt—in every major region worldwide. Data and discovery risks have been especially impacted. We gathered a roundtable of our experts from France, Germany, Ireland, and Spain to discuss these issues in detail.
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Legal Operations: Creating In-House Efficiencies using Technology Modernization
Legal departments of all sizes are turning to legal operations professionals to support the expansion of capabilities and infrastructure optimization as the needs of in-house counsel grow. In-house legal spend increased 13% from 2018 to 2020* and 61% of legal departments now employ at least one legal operations professional, a 39.4% increase since 2015. With the increased investment in and emphasis on legal operations comes added responsibility and expectations to deliver on the promise of creating greater efficiency in corporate legal. In this session, we discuss practical steps for those assuming new legal operations roles or increased responsibility to develop efficiencies by focusing on technology modernization as a critical lever in delivering value in 2021.
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With All Eyes on International Data Transfers, Five Tips to Stay Compliant
In Europe, regulatory scrutiny over data flows from EU member countries to the U.S., U.K. and other non-member jurisdictions is picking up steam. The Schrems II ruling is serving as a primary driver, arming EU data protection authorities (DPAs) with a new platform for enforcing GDPR.
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Business Security in Times of Furloughs and Home Working
The effects of COVID-19 have led many companies worldwide to take drastic measures. This includes applications for temporal layoffs or furloughs, with the additional uncertainty of definitive layoffs for vast numbers of employees. In this article, Javier Garcia-Chappell and Grainne Bryan discuss the necessary measures to protect and secure their data, as well as those devices and/or corporate media that may store them.
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Corporate Investigations X-Factors
Examining the evolving landscape and emerging methods in responding to regulatory inquiries and fraud investigations
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Q&A: Conor Gavin Discusses E-Discovery Trends and Segment Growth in Ireland
Demand for e-discovery and digital forensics capabilities is growing rapidly in Ireland. FTI Consulting is stepping up to the market’s emerging needs with the expansion of experts in the region and solutions to address the increasing complexity of litigation, investigations and governance in today’s climate. We recently spoke with Conor Gavin, a Senior Director in the segment’s Dublin office, to discuss his focus for supporting clients in Ireland and what he sees as the key issues for the year ahead.
Blog Post
The ePrivacy regulation has had an uncertain path, and at times it seemed as though there would be no regulation introduced at all. One of the main stumbling blocks is the impact on online behavioural advertising and cookies walls on websites. However, in mid-February, the Council of the European Union’s Presidency announced a breakthrough: member states finally reached an agreement on the draft text. The next stage will be negotiations between the Commission, the Council, and the European Parliament.
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Privacy Compliance for Small and Mid-Sized Businesses; It’s Not One Size Fits All
Read any survey of the challenges small and mid-sized business leaders face, and you’ll see an array of worries over managing cash, retaining customers, competing and keeping up with technological change. Chances are that regulatory compliance and data privacy aren’t making those lists of issues keeping SMB owners up at night. In fact, the majority of SMBs (80% according to one survey) know very little about whether and how data protection laws affect their business. Nevertheless, many data protection regulations are indiscriminate when it comes to organization size, and with consumers paying increasing attention to data privacy, the issue has become very real in the SMB arena.
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Concurrences 2nd Cartels Workshop: An Advanced Seminar On Substantive And Procedural EU Developments
A recording of the ‘Procedural Issues’ webinar discussion, by a panel of experts, including FTI Technology’s Ashley Brickles. The panel discussed discuss the latest in EU Procedural developments, including dawn raids, reduction of leniency, new tools used by NCAs to detect cartels, legal privilege, and confidentiality.
Blog Post
E-Discovery in 2021 is a Brave New World
Anyone who’s been in the e-discovery industry for any length of time knows that change is the only constant. It’s a practice and industry born from the very notion of change, and has been evolving steadily since its early days two decades ago. What’s happened over the last year is that the rate of change is now quickly picking up momentum. Trends that were just emerging in 2019 took full shape and began disrupting the space in 2020. More advancements—in the demands of e-discovery and the innovations brought forth to meet those demands—are on the horizon.
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Adapt, Rebound, Learn: Legal Industry Predictions Following the Strangest Year on the Books
Across FTI Technology, our teams have the opportunity to work on some of the most complex, high-stakes and innovative matters in the world. While 2020 was anything but typical, the work of helping clients problem-solve through technology was a familiar constant. In reflecting back on the lessons learned from the year and the related implications for the future of the legal industry, our global teams have gathered numerous predictions for what outside counsel and in-house legal teams can expect to face in the new year. A snapshot of these are shared below.
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How Cartel Investigations are Evolving Alongside Data and Technology Advancements
Ashley Brickles recently participated in a cartels workshop hosted by Concurrences, alongside speakers from Herbert Smith Freehills, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), General Electric and the European Commission department for competition (DG COMP). The panellists comprised a diverse set of backgrounds and perspectives, which provided for a lively and educational session that covered procedural changes in cartel investigations, privacy concerns that have arisen in competition proceedings and the extent of the Commission’s investigatory powers.
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Much has happened in 2020. In this session we look back at the start of 2020 and what we thought the year would bring and adjust our predictions based on what the year actually delivered.
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Now in its sixth year, the report takes a deep dive into the leadership structures, core functions, staff and budgets, and tasks and priorities of privacy programs around the globe. It provides key metrics on ongoing compliance with core pieces of privacy legislation and the effects of recent legal rulings and guidance from data protection authorities on processing operations.
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The IAPP-FTI Consulting Annual Privacy Governance Report 2020
The IAPP-FTI Consulting Privacy Governance Report is the primary annual study benchmarking the privacy profession. Now in its sixth year, the report takes a deep dive into the leadership structures, core functions, staff and budgets, and tasks and priorities of privacy programs around the globe. It provides key metrics on ongoing compliance with core pieces of privacy legislation and the effects of recent legal rulings and guidance from data protection authorities on processing operations.
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General counsel have long been tasked with mitigating organizational risk, but more and more are being asked to become strategic business partners. This year saw general counsel stretch themselves in ways unimaginable prior to the events of 2020. The pandemic and heightened awareness for social inequities have asked general counsel to place increased attention on existing core competencies as well as add new ones. From anticipating work-from-home driven data risks to managing employee health and championing inclusion and diversity, general counsel are critical to navigating all that 2020 has had to offer.
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The General Counsel Report 2021
Learn how major events impacted the role of general counsel and how the learnings from 2020 can be applied to effectively navigate 2021. The report features candid responses from over 30 surveyed general counsel.
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IT’s Role in Supporting Global Privacy Compliance
While privacy programs are typically driven by stakeholders in legal and compliance, the requirements, resources, policies, processes and technologies involved with data privacy compliance often cross over with Information Technology (IT). Existing and emerging data privacy and data protection regulations also introduce a new set of considerations for IT teams to address when sourcing, deploying, managing or sunsetting systems and working with third-party providers.
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E-discovery in 2020: The Sudden Shift in Our Data Footprint
The pandemic has impacted us all in many ways, personally and professionally. Like any major event, the impact of the pandemic and its ripple effects will be studied for many years to come. This holds true for e-discovery. In this FTI Report we examine the impact of rapid change in our discoverable data make-up. We take a close-up view of what it means for legal teams---how to adapt, adjust and take action as analyzing rich media as well as fragmented chat strings become key to e-discovery and investigation efficacy.
Blog Post
E-Discovery Predictions Revisited
So far, 2020 has been…. an “experience." The challenges our industry had braced for, the opportunities we planned to seize, have been suddenly upended in ways we never would have anticipated. At the end of last year, our team shared a few predictions for what was to come in 2020. They weren’t wrong, but the landscape in which they are coming to fruition has changed significantly from what we envisioned. Now, looking at the wake COVID-19 has left behind to date, it’s a good time to revisit those predictions and revise them to match the way the world, the legal industry and e-discovery have changed this year.
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SEC Cyber Report Focuses on Information Governance Best Practices
In January, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) released its most substantial cybersecurity guidance to date. The report, “Cybersecurity and Resiliency Observations,” was the result of examination findings and research from the last five years, much of which was led by the commission’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE). This is the first comprehensive guidance we’ve seen from the SEC’s cyber unit since it was established several years ago. In many ways, it reads as an examination pamphlet—outlining the essential information security practices and programs a financial services institution will need to have in place to stand up against a government raid, inquiry or investigation.
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Preparing For The Shift In Discoverable Data Caused By COVID
The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred an unprecedented spike in the use of collaboration applications and the creation of unique cloud source data. Rapid adoption of tools including Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom and other communication platforms is quickly displacing email and changing the footprint of corporate data forever. Learn how to approach reviewing these data types and their exploding volumes as Tim Anderson shares his key considerations for handling the rapid shift to our data foot print.
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Why Global Reach and Local Expertise Matter in Cross-Border E-discovery
The interconnectedness of people, organizations and nations around the world has never been more apparent than it is today. The ongoing and rapid increase in globalization has driven change and growth in countless industries, transformation in business processes, diversification in economies, and yes, even widespread pandemics. It has also led to a spike in cross-border legal and e-discovery matters—a trend that is continuing on an upswing. Navigating international e-discovery in the best of circumstances is a challenge for even the most sophisticated attorneys. It is more so now, as legal teams struggle to adapt their work in the midst of this global health crisis.
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Five Steps To E-Discovery Workforce Continuity in Our New Normal
At FTI, we have adapted our e-discovery offerings to adhere to pandemic-related stay-at-home orders and distancing policies. In this guide, we share the steps we have taken to maintain continuity with the hope you can apply them to your own organization and teams.
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Maintaining Continuity as We Adapt to The New Normal
At FTI, we have adapted our e-discovery offerings to adhere to pandemic-related stay-at-home orders and distancing policies. In this guide, we share the steps we have taken to maintain continuity with the hope you can apply them to your own organization and teams.
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Q&A: Geoff Budge Leads Technology Practice in South Africa, Offers Business Guidance for COVID-19
Managing Director Geoff Budge has been working with FTI clients in South Africa for more than three years. Now, he is building a team of experts and solutions for the newly-established Technology practice in South Africa. His team will focus on expanding in the region and delivering the Technology segment’s client-centric, flexible model across e-discovery, information governance, risk, data privacy, security and legal operations solutions. We talked to Geoff about this move, and his thoughts on the biggest issues corporations in South Africa are facing during the current pandemic.
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Q&A: Renato Fazzone Discusses Expanding Footprint and Client Service in Germany
The recent appointment of Renato Fazzone as Senior Managing Director and Germany Head of Technology established our permanent presence in the German market for our Technology practice. Backed by more than 15 years working in e-discovery and litigation support, as well as advising clients on corporate fraud and antitrust matters, Renato is eager to expand our offerings and expertise to clients in the region. We recently sat down with him to discuss his vision, the top issues impacting German corporations today, and how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting FTI’s offerings.
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Managing Your Software Assets in the New World of COVID-19
Life endures even in the most difficult situations—and it adapts and evolves to meet new challenges. Now, as we watch, and fight back against the spread of COVID-19 worldwide, we are arriving at the very edge of an evolution, a new future, a new workspace model that tackles today’s limitations. With COVID-19 leading to lockdowns, organizations are facing their unique challenges as they try to cope with both the safety of their people and the continuity of business. This article will explore some of these changes related to IT and software assets, along with their potential consequences.
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Q&A: Successful E-Discovery Starts with Comprehensive Case Management
In e-discovery, counsel and review teams are juggling a lot of moving parts. Between collecting data across numerous locations and data types, assessing key facts, establishing workflows and determining which analytics to apply, e-discovery teams have little time to worry about the logistics of project management. At FTI, Emily Seabury and Elizabeth Noble are among the team of case managers behind the scenes, making sure everything runs smoothly from start to finish. They and FTI’s broader client teams aspire to always be anticipating the next steps to reach a client’s goal, so that the client need never to ask for an update or flag something that needs to be done. We sat down with Emily and Elizabeth to discuss our case management system, and why it is so crucial to ensuring successful outcomes for client matters.
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Case Narratives and The Next Generation of Discovery
As e-discovery technology advances, expert teams are utilizing new processes to improve on the existing workflows and to drive greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness in factual case strategy development. In turn, attorneys that partner with researchers will serve their clients better, faster and more cost effectively during this critical phase of litigations and investigations. This will lead to improved client satisfaction and allow attorneys to maintain their positions as trusted advisors, all while continuing to deliver consistency and quality.
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Q&A: David Meadows Joins FTI, Eyes Innovation in E-Discovery and Investigations
Newly appointed as a Senior Managing Director, David Meadows is bringing his e-discovery and computer forensics expertise to FTI Technology’s E-Discovery Consulting & Services and Digital Forensics & Investigations practices. Based out of the Chicago office, David will help clients leverage advanced analytics to reduce cost and risk around their data challenges. He sat down with us to discuss his new role and his thoughts on innovation.
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2020 Forecast: Expect Landmark Changes in E-Discovery, Data Privacy and Investigations
Across our practice areas, we asked our experts to share their predictions for what will shape legal, compliance and information governance in the coming year. Below is a roundup—across new laws, emerging technology and key industries—of what they expect will make the biggest impact to businesses worldwide.
Webcast
The Business of Law 2020: The FTI-Relativity General Counsel Survey
What does the future hold for law and business in 2020 and beyond? Chief legal officers provide a unique perspective, and to analyze that perspective, Relativity and the FTI Technology business unit of FTI Consulting commissioned a study by Ari Kaplan Advisors, surveying general counsel on a wide variety of legal issues affecting business and the legal profession. Limiting the study to chief legal officers, the survey covered topics ranging from the technical competence of legal teams to preparedness for cyberattacks. Attend this webcast to understand what these results imply about the future of the legal industry.
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The General Counsel Report: Corporate Legal Departments in 2020
FTI Technology and Relativity partnered with Ari Kaplan Advisors to survey chief legal officers about the future of the legal industry and the skills and expertise needed for the next generation of lawyers. The results of these interviews clearly indicate an industry in transition across four key areas: the evolving role of in-house counsel, risk factors and how the modern legal department is addressing them, technology and innovation in law, and advice that general counsel have for their law firms and for future lawyers.
Blog Post
Europe’s highest court, The European Court of Justice ("ECJ") in Luxembourg, ruled on two cases last week involving GDPR’s right to be forgotten as it applies to information available on the internet. In the first ruling, the court held that the privacy rule cannot be applied outside the European Union. In the second, the court said the right to freedom of information must be balanced against the right to privacy and specifically the right to have links related to certain categories of personal data automatically deleted.
Webcast
Data Privacy Implications of Cloud-Based Social Collaboration Apps
An array of cloud-based workplace collaboration tools and messaging applications have become standard inside organizations around the globe. Yet many companies are unable to control the growth, management and discovery of the data within these applications. Oftentimes third parties host the data, but lack standard export workflows or preservation policies and process, making it difficult to obtain, quantify or assess. And, perhaps most importantly for those concerned with privacy, these applications are often engineered to prioritize individual user privacy, at the risk of enabling any sort of organized governance.
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In Two Decades, E-discovery Has Changed and Stayed the Same
E-discovery is a continually changing practice. For approximately two decades now, it has played a tremendous role in shaping the legal world. As e-discovery’s influence and prevalence has grown over the years, the technologies, economics, processes and expertise around it have in many ways become unrecognizable to what they were in the early 2000s. Still, much about the field has also remained the same.
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Craig Earnshaw on the Changes in E-discovery Over His Long Career
Craig Earnshaw has been working in FTI Consulting’s Technology segment for 10 years and had already spent ten years in the then-nascent e-discovery and Computer Forensics world before that. In this interview he talks about the changes which he has seen over that time, identifying three main changes. One is what he calls the "frequency of requirement" – the increasing need to look at data on a computer system for any disputes/investigations exercise. Second, he points to a rise in the number of lawyers who understand and practice in areas which require a knowledge of e-discovery practice. Third, Craig points to the range and diversity of companies delivering software and services to corporations and law firms.
White Paper
Advice from Counsel: State of the Union on Data Privacy & Security
The 12th Advice from Counsel study explores how issues of data security and privacy impact in-house legal teams at Fortune 1000 corporations and reveals the top concerns and emerging best practices across three key and intersecting topics: the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”), IG and data security and remediation.
Blog Post
Regulatory Compliance as a Competitive Advantage
Next year, firms around the globe will be impacted by some of the world’s toughest new regulations and privacy requirements. Adapting to this new landscape was a key topic at The Lawyer's Managing Risk and Litigation conference.
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Using Information Governance Tactics to Prepare for the GDPR
Much like Information Governance, preparation for the General Data Protection Regulation is a cross-departmental concern that requires input from many different groups within an organization, including privacy, compliance, legal, line of business, IT and information security.
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The legal industry is hungry for guidance on how to deal with the explosion in cloud-based applications and new data types that are creating headaches for organizations of all sizes. While the threat of big data has cast a shadow over IT and legal departments for several years, the real challenge is proving to be the variety of data, and it is quickly defeating traditional collection and review tools and strategies.
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The Lawyer - Global Litigation 50 Report, 2017
Technology is revolutionising the way lawyers practice their trade. To deliver the greatest value to their clients, legal professionals must know about the latest technological solutions.
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As employees migrate to an ever-increasing number of apps, how can legal teams ensure that this data is picked up as part of the usual e-discovery process?
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A Prescription that Works: Analytics for Healthcare Companies
In a recent article in New Jersey Law Journal, FTI Managing Director Colleen Casey Voshell wrote about how analytics tools can boost information governance initiatives for healthcare companies and other corporations in highly regulated industries. Because healthcare organizations must juggle the tasks of maintaining compliance with regulations, dealing with a high volume of litigation and securing sensitive data that contains customer and/or patient information, information governance and overall data management are becoming exceedingly difficult to navigate.
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The State of Information Governance in Corporations
For this Advice from Counsel study, we interviewed in-house counsel to better understand the health and success of information governance programs within corporations. The results clearly show that with a few exceptions, most organizations are in the early stages of information governance adoption. Yet these executives have strong advice on how best to begin and implement an IG initiative. From these results, organizations can better under¬stand how their peers are successfully keeping an eye on the big picture while executing quick wins that help build momentum for broader IG initiatives.
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Monumental Ruling on Predictive Coding in the UK
By now you have probably heard about the February 16th ruling in the case Pyrrho Investments and MWB Business Exchange v. MWB Property and others by Master Matthews of English High Court. In the ruling, Master Matthews outlines many of today’s e-discovery (or ‘e-disclosure’) challenges for litigants – the growing mountain of data for any-sized litigant, and the shortcomings of keyword searches.
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Legaltech New York (LTNY) 2016
We’re excited to discuss some of the biggest trends impacting the legal industry at Legaltech New York (LTNY) 2016. Learn more about our day one panels featuring noted industry thought leaders from the bench, corporations and law firms.
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Why Data Deletion Makes Sense (and Dollars)
Conventional wisdom says the cost of storing data is declining. That’s true. But the total cost to businesses to store data is rising unsustainably because they are collecting — and retaining — more data than ever before. The key to controlling costs and freeing up operating capital is deleting data you don’t need to store. How do you know what you don’t need? Two words: information governance.
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Measuring Your E-discovery Program Against Industry, 2015
How does your e-discovery program measure against your peers? How does your team size, budget and technology adoption compare to other companies? Download the study now to learn best practices from Fortune 1000 e-discovery professionals on a range of topics, from data security to budget transparency and retention policies.
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What do Van Halen, M&Ms and metrics in e-discovery have to do with one another? More than you might think.