Hanzo Blog

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!

The hot topic this year was how new technologies, like ChatGPT, are poised to disrupt the way legal work is done. Some lawyers are scrambling to adapt while others are already using this latest iteration of AI to automate tasks such as drafting legal documents and conducting legal research. Chatbots are also being used to provide legal advice and customer service, but the full impact and ethical concerns around these technologies are still unknown. One thing is clear, they will have a significant impact on the legal profession.

Hanzo Spotlight+ brings AI-powered data enrichment to early case assessment to reduce risk and more efficiently identify critical data for investigations within collaboration applications.

Ready for lift-off? Before you know it, you'll be boarding a plane for Legalweek, the annual event that draws thousands of legal professionals to gather, network with peers, earn their CLEs, and explore the latest tools and trends affecting the industry.  Hanzo is a proud Legalweek sponsor and we'd love to meet with you. The following are five compelling reasons to connect with Hanzo during the conference or celebrate with Hanzo and ACEDS at the Annual Legalweek Community Cocktail Reception.

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.

Workplace complaints are serious. Even if a claim doesn’t lead to disciplinary action, the fact that an employee has made an accusation usually indicates workplace problems that need to be addressed for productivity, morale, and quality of work life.