Author: james.gill@hanzo.co (Jim Gill)

In recent years, there has been an increasing trend for companies to claim environmental sustainability, making public commitments to lower carbon emissions and other eco-friendly measures. However, this rise in environmental claims has also led to the concern of greenwashing, where companies make false or exaggerated statements about their environmental practices. This article delves into the issue of greenwashing, its risks, and the lack of accountability and regulation for ESG commitments.

The rise of collaboration tools like Slack and MS Teams has brought about new challenges for legal departments. While these platforms have become the new water cooler in remote workplaces, they pose unique information governance and ediscovery challenges. This is due to the informal and casual nature of chats on these platforms, which includes the use of emojis, memes, and GIFs, making it difficult to preserve, collect, or produce these messages for legal matters and investigations. Additionally, the complexity of collaboration data, which spans across multiple channels, adds to the difficulty. Furthermore, the sheer volume of data generated on these platforms has increased exponentially since the pandemic, making it challenging for legal departments to review the messages effectively.

That's why we've created this four-part blog series to discuss challenges with Slack and MS Teams before and during litigation and how technology can help, as well as best practices.

ESG and sustainability are two concepts that have gained significant prominence recently. The World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation defines ESG as a set of factors that companies and investors consider regarding environmental, social, and governance issues. On the other hand, sustainability refers to organizations' actions to achieve their environmental, social, and corporate governance goals. This article delves into the relationship between ESG and sustainability and why they have become such critical considerations for enterprises today.

Last month, I reported on five new privacy laws going into effect in 2023. Well, now we can add one more to the list of US state privacy laws on the books.

Why Are ESI Protocols Important for Legal Teams During Ediscovery?

Ensure Preservation of Relevant ESI: ESI protocols help to ensure that relevant ESI is properly preserved, collected, and produced. These protocols can specify the types of ESI that must be preserved, how it should be collected and stored, and who is responsible for ensuring its preservation.

We Take Search for Granted

Remember the days when you wanted to look for a document using the file manager on your desktop and you’d forgotten exactly where it was stored? It would take forever and sometimes freeze the operating system, and then you still didn’t find the file you were looking for, so you went to each folder on the C-drive and looked through everything manually. Ah, the good old days!

2023 may be the year of privacy laws. Five states have new laws that go into effect this year, which will likely usher in a new era of consumer privacy protections in the United States.

Tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams were on the rise before the global pandemic; now, they’ve become integral for employee communication at large enterprises, whether they’re in the office, working from home, or a hybrid.

In ediscovery, most of the information collected during litigation involves email and other communication data (e.g. Slack and MS Teams). But the growing use of SaaS applications adds an additional element to the blanket term “collaboration data.”

These applications encompass many uses, including project management, ticketing services, content management, sales data, and more. And each of them usually contains a communications element using comments or built-in messaging channels. This dynamic functionality along with the easily adoptable nature of these applications creates a sprawl of complex sources of discoverable information across the enterprise data landscape.

How ubiquitous is SaaS sprawl? In a 2022 Hanzo blog, I cited a source that showed 99% of organizations were using one or more SaaS solutions at the end of 2021. And even more telling, according to the 2020 SaaS Trends Report, enterprises with employees ranging from 100-1000+, used on average 288 different applications within their organization. That study also cited a 60% app turnover rate, indicating a constant influx of new data sources continually introduced into an organization’s enterprise data stores.

In the 2022 Collaboration Data Benchmarking Report, just over a third (38%) of organizations said that they could not live without collaboration tools, while another 35% said that some of their teams could not live without collaboration tools. When asked how important collaboration tools will be 12 months down the road, 16% of organizations said they wouldn’t be able to live without them, while 37% said they will become more dependent on them.

Last year, the FTC announced they were going to “crackdown on harmful commercial surveillance and lax data security,” and have been pursuing a number of lawsuits as a result. Many of these are bold in their approach, which may catch many corporate legal teams off guard.

It’s already February, and chances are, most of us have already broken our New Year’s Resolutions. But no matter the time of year, when it comes to your ediscovery workflow, it’s never too late to trim the data you're collecting from messaging platforms and other SaaS applications.