For the third installment of the “E-Discovery Gold Nuggets” blog, ACEDS Kansas City Chapter Leader Daniel Gold tackles topics of data transparency and the slippery slope of data. Gold shares industry insight and e-discovery tips in the original LinkedIn series of minute-long videos. The Managing Director of E-Discovery Managed Services for ACEDS partner BDO, Gold draws from years of experience in the legal technology world.

Data Transparency

“Today, I want to chat about data transparency. As I’ve spoken about in a previous video, having an organization’s data diversify across multiple law firms and e-discovery providers can potentially have multiple consequences. One of which is data security, as firms and providers may not have the same security requirements and controls as the organization.

This can obviously lead to a slippery slope in data security. The greater lack of centralization of where e-discovery data goes, the more difficult it is to budget for e-discovery services. This leads to spending unnecessary time and energy, creating apples to apples comparison between different e-discovery providers.

What’s worse, it creates an unbelievably uphill challenge of transparency around the data. Transparency leads to being able to tell better stories about your organization’s data. Telling better stories allows you to pivot, shift, and make more vastly strategic business and tactical decisions.

So here’s the question: have you created critical success factors as streamlining and centralizing your data to create greater data transparency?  

I’d love to connect with you to hear more about the challenges you’re facing and how Athenagy may be able to help you and your team with data transparency. Until next time, I’m Daniel Gold and this was another E-Discovery Gold Nugget.

Watch episode #6 of “E-Discovery Gold Nuggets”

Slippery Slope of Data

“Today, I want to chat about the slippery slope of data. From a security perspective a corporation maintains, protects, backs up, and defends the data that its employees create daily. When a company knows, or reasonably should know, that litigation is going to ensue, a litigation’s hold is put on the appropriate custodians. When the preserved data needs to be collected, it is then often outsourced to a law firm and then outsourced again to a legacy e-discovery provider.

And that is where the slope gets, well, really slippery. As I’ve written about before, security questionnaires to both law firms and e-discovery providers are not always created equal. What is pretty standard and equal is asking who has the lowest cost per gig to process and pose data.

Under the ABA Rules of Professional Responsibility, we have an ethical duty as lawyers to ensure that there is an alignment in data security protocols between the company, the law firm, and the service provider.

So here’s the question: what do you do to ensure the highest levels of security compliance once the data leaves the four walls of your organization? And what types of compliance measures have you implemented?

Until next time, I’m Daniel Gold and this was another E-Discovery Gold Nugget.”

Watch episode #7 of “E-Discovery Gold Nuggets”