Monday Clicks: Lawyers Need to be Tech-Savvy

April 4, 2013

 

Like it or not, technology use in law firms is here to stay. And thanks the ABA’s recent resolution that lawyers keep up to date on “relevant” technologies and duly protect electronically stored confidential information, it’s time to get tech-savvy on everything from mobile apps to data plans and security issues. Also: Are robot juries in our future?

  • While lawyers don’t need to become IT experts, they do “need to know enough to be sure they’re not overlooking important issues,” says an ABA Journal article. The article details a few issues that could occur if you’re not actively aware of IT trends and how it’s used.
  • In “The Mobile Lawyer,” ABA Journal  writer Joe Dysart covers the increased use of smartphone apps and other mobile technology in the administration of legal services. And while you may not to open your own virtual firm, the article shows how several firms are using mobile apps to serve clients on the go.
  • Unfortunately, mobile devices are often prone to security issues that can open your firm to hackers. “Mobile device security issues fall into four key categories,” Legal Technology News states. “One is an accident; the others are criminal.” Read how to protect yourself and your firm here.
  • Data is only as useful as your ability to use it, according to a couple videos on capturing and utilizing big data. “Big Data: Can You Seize the Opportunity?” covers how data project implementation is different from other IT implementation and “Native Data” explains why electronically stored records should be kept in their original formats.
  • Big data needs a big data plan, or so says the HBR Blog Network. In “The Case for Crafting a Big Data Plan,” David Court notes that “most companies fail to put in the time required to create a simple plan for how data, analytics, front-line tools, and people can come together to create business value.” A plan, he writes, should focus on three core elements: data, analytic models and tools.
  • But what happens to all the data you don’t need? Often, it just eats up valuable memory. It could also become a liability. ABA Journal covers how to “regularly jettison the burgeoning morass of irrelevant emails, texts, social media posts and other detritus … without fear of significant sanctions should someone with a discovery order come calling.”
  • Can robots spot lies? Maybe. European scientists recently fed testimony from several Italian court cases into a computer using text analysis software. The testimony was from defendants who were later found to be lying. The robots were able to correctly identify lies 53 percent of the time and the truth 75 percent.

Thanks to   at http://hildebrandtblog.com

 

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Posted by david ricketts

What exactly is defensible deletion?

October 25, 2012

Philip Favro of Symantec, in an article called Defensible Deletion: The Cornerstone of Intelligent Information Governance on the eDiscovery 2.0 blog, defines defensible deletion as “a comprehensive approach that companies implement to reduce the storage costs and legal risks associated with the retention of electronically stored information (ESI)”.

He goes on to say that organisations which have done this “have been successful in avoiding court sanctions while at the same time eliminating ESI that has little or no business value”

That is the point, of course, of the word “defensible” in this context. It matters most in the US, where everyone goes in fear of the sanctions bogeyman, apparently without regard to the terms of Rule 37(e) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure which reads as follows:

(e) Failure to Provide Electronically Stored Information. Absent exceptional circumstances, a court may not impose sanctions under these rules on a party for failing to provide electronically stored information lost as a result of the routine, good-faith operation of an electronic information system.

Most other jurisdictions can manage without this “safe harbor” because they do not have the same (alleged) reason to fear sanctions. I say “alleged” because if US companies paid more attention to Rule 37(e), they too could set about the deletion of material which is not presently the subject of a legal hold and which is not required for statutory or business purposes. It would help, too, if they read some of the sanctions Opinions which cause such dread to see how many of them were the consequence of the “routine, good-faith operation of an electronic information system”.

If you are short of ROI information to justify the work involved in a defensible deletion programme, try and calculate how much money was spent last year processing and reprocessing useless data for eDiscovery purposes, rejecting it time after time, at considerable expense. There’s a big chunk of ROI there.

Thanks to http://chrisdale.wordpress.com/

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Posted by david ricketts

In Data Security, You’re Only As Strong As Your Weakest Link

March 27, 2012

Reporter: “Why do you rob banks?”

Willie Sutton (bank robber): “Because that’s where the money is.”

That’s Sutton’s law. It seems obvious, but it’s so very true. The law also holds true for hackers– they will attack systems that store valuable data.

So where might that be? My first guess would be the iron-clad data centers of the world’s largest banks, pharmaceutical companies, defense contractors, governments, and Fortune 500 corporations. They are the big juicy targets, right? But attractive targets aren’t necessarily easy targets.

Today, banks and other high profile institutions have state-of-the-art data protection in the form of firewalls, two-factor authentication, sophisticated encryption, and Varonis. Hence the term “bank-level security.” As a result, hackers have to weigh the value of a successful attack against the difficulty of breaching the target.

What if there were a way to seize a corporation’s digital secrets without having to penetrate their heavily fortified walls? A group of Chinese hackers figured out a rather cunning way to do it – infiltrate the company’s much more vulnerable law firm instead!

According to Mandiant, a Virginia-based security firm, 80 major US law firms were hacked last year. Clearly, law firms are becoming a primary back door that hackers are using to gain access to valuable corporate data. But it’s not just law firms we have to worry about, unfortunately.

Any time you send an email to another party—e.g., law firms, accountants, consultants—or transfer confidential documents to DropBox or Google Docs, you’re implicitly trusting that they take security as seriously as your own security admins do, and that they can determine, at all times, who can access your data and who is accessing your data.

The fact is that many organizations, including the growing number of cloud service vendors, haven’t even scratched the surface when it comes to serious data protection and security. The message is clear: start now. Your customers will demand it.

by Rob Sobers

Thanks to www.varonis.com

 

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Posted by david ricketts

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