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ASCERTUS BLOG
MAKING THE CASE FOR DARK DATA DISCOVERY IN LEGAL FIRMS
Ascertus are the official reseller and implementation partner for ActiveNav.
According to the American Bar Association’s 2022 Legal Technology Survey Report,
27% of law firms reported having experienced a security breach. An increasing
awareness of breach risk and prevalence, coupled with growing customer concerns
related to data privacy, has lead law firms’ clients to become increasingly
stringent over data stewardship and governance. At the same time, law firms are
facing increasing pressure to innovate with data at the heart of the effort,
seeking competitive advantage through the introduction of generative AI
capabilities and services.
The problem is, not unlike other industries, law firms’ data practices are messy
at best. The pressures on partners, attorneys and their staff often lead to
disparate information management practices, while the variety of communication,
collaboration and document management solutions (DMS) can make the technology
difficult to navigate. This means that the DMS (or equivalent) only contains
part of the picture for any given matter with the remainder retained in email or
personal devices indefinitely, or misfiled in general folders. What’s more,
client personal or sensitive data is often poorly controlled, becoming mixed in
with matter or, worse, shared in routine communications.
THE DATA DISCOVERY PROBLEM
Accumulated over time, these patterns have been left largely unaddressed. This
means that:
* Firms are not complying with outside counsel guidelines for data retention
according to practice area (from HIPAA, through CPRA to the state bar’s data
privacy compliance requirements).
* Sensitive personal data is stored and spilled into unknown storage
environments, ripe for the attention of a threat actor in the event of a
breach.
* Precedent is not readily available for re-use or, more importantly, for the
training of the Generative AI models which will drive the firm’s next horizon
for competitive advantage.
There’s no law firm that doesn’t recognize these issues – just ask any of their
IT, governance, records or operations teams. The problem is that prioritizing
the necessary change is a challenging task needing leadership, and information
governance (IG) or IT teams have no visibility into the data or the risk it
presents against outside counsel guidelines or regulations, especially as cases
evolve and change over time.
ZERO DARK DATA
The purpose of data discovery technologies is to provide the foundational
capability for achieving and sustaining Zero Dark Data. These technologies build
and maintain an inventory of all data assets so that information governance and
compliance teams are armed with a clear understanding of data risk and
compliance. This enables three key information governance capabilities:
* Conduct timely and accurate data audits for client (outside counsel)
compliance and in response to regulatory requirements.
* Identify and resolve areas of misfiling or spillage, whether that be of
client matter, the firm’s valuable intellectual property or sensitive
personal data, ensuring the necessary retention policies are applied.
* Maintaining an efficient and high-quality information environment in support
of legal operations and for timely response to information events such as
partner departure, acquisitions or divestitures and legal discovery.
Without an operational data discovery capability, IG teams are effectively
required to work in the dark, relying on judgement and experience, rather than
data, to direct their efforts. This promotes a reactive rather than proactive
posture, leading to significant inefficiencies and incomplete coverage of the
firm’s data assets.
BUSINESS CASE
Investment in a sustainable data discovery capability enables a broad range of
data use cases across the firm, yet governance teams can often struggle to make
the case to leadership. The following summarizes the business case areas, along
with examples of enabled use cases.
Business case area Impact User cases Data risk liability * * * * * • Assured,
evidence-based, response to client audit requests
• Reduced impact of data breach or loss
• Reduced likelihood of data spillage or loss Compliance * * * * * • Application
of retention and disposal policies across entire data estate
• Accurate and timely response to subject rights requests
• Data mapping and minimization for privacy regulation compliance Data quality &
value * * * * • Maintain trusted client matter datasets
• Clean data for machine learning training
• Efficient and accurate data transfer and mobility, including departing
partners Business opportunity * * * • Enhanced brand reputation through
demonstrable data stewardship
• Develop competencies for an information governance practice Cost reduction * *
• Reduced storage and business continuity costs
• Reduced load for cloud or repository migration
Of course, this considers only one side of the business case equation. These
must be balanced with the costs incurred, be they in procurement and licensing,
infrastructure and support, staff time and training etc. The fact is that
predominantly, data discovery technologies can ask a lot in terms of
infrastructure and especially database storage and hardware. That is why
cloud-hosted discovery services are becoming available and especially why we
have launched our own cloud-hosted service designed to make data discovery cost
effective both to implement and sustain.
CONCLUSION: LIFE WITHOUT DATA DISCOVERY
The hard truth, regardless of industry sector, is that revenue-generating staff
continually struggle with the tools they are provided for managing their
information. Legal firms are no exception; partners and attorneys are under
continuous pressure and frequently make errors or take risks with data simply to
get things done. This leads to spillage and misfiling of client matter data
which, in turn, increases the risk of unintentional data transfer, data loss or
breach. Further, when those key staff inevitably move on, these accumulated
practices make it difficult and costly to assemble a trusted client dataset.
Without the ability to discover, monitor and understand their firm’s data assets
at scale, information governance teams have always been on the back foot,
firefighting and reacting to point issues as they occur. This has led to an
accumulation of dark data which obscures these practices and risks.
Driven by the increasing incidence of breach and growing privacy concerns of
their customers, the message from outside council is that firms need to
demonstrate that they understand where their clients’ data is and how it is
governed. Data discovery tools make unstructured data transparent and empower
information governance teams to understand and proactively manage data risk.
This enables them to support revenue generating attorneys, provide
evidence-based assurance to clients and, in turn, protect the firm’s reputation
as a good data steward.
* See all the benefits of ActiveNav's dark data solution
* Please click here to download this article in PDF format.
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