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Nuix, a worldwide provider of information management technologies, will be the official sponsor of The Cowen Group's Information Governance Group.
The Information Governance Group, established in late 2010, is a community of thought leaders and subject matter experts from major corporations and the AmLaw 200. The group comprises decision makers and influencers collaborating with their peers around the challenges and opportunities surrounding the governance of electronic information.
In the 18 months since the group's inception, IGG has already developed a loyal following. Duke Alden, Vice President and Global Lead of Information Governance at Aon noted, "The Information Governance Group is my number one go-to for thought leadership in this exploding professional space. I simply haven't found another knowledge-sharing series that packs as much punch. The quality of the attendees, programming, and discussion is second to none."
With Nuix's sponsorship and participation, the Information Governance Group will have the opportunity for more meaningful interaction, enabling unique member-to-member knowledge sharing while empowering members and developing thought leadership. The participants, who already meet regularly on monthly webinars and collaborate with each other on a private workspace, will now be able to attend face-to-face educational discussion forums and workshops throughout the United States.
"Information governance is a major and growing issue that business and government organizations are struggling with," said Eddie Sheehy, CEO of Nuix. "We are delighted to have this opportunity to contribute to the important discussions going on around information governance and help the industry’s thought leaders share ideas and best practices."
We are excited to have Nuix contributing to the professional and personal development of the Information Governance Group participants, which fosters innovation while accelerating and elevating the careers of information governance professionals around the country and across the world.
The Cowen Group kicks-off our Q2 Leadership Breakfast and Signature Dinner series next week! During our preparations, we have been thinking about how the legal services market has been impacted by the forecast of "hottest trends" that are always deliberated about at the beginning of every year.
It is no surprise to anyone who attended LegalTech New York and the ACEDS Conference in Florida, or who has read an eDiscovery blog in the past two months what these buzz worthy topics are: Technology Assisted Review, the exploding use of social media and cloud computing in the business world, LPOs, and Big Data are the technology tickets to watch for changes in our industry. On the human capital side, The Cowen Group has predicted a staggering increase of 375 new jobs in the eDiscovery/litigation support market this year and the expanding role of the paratechnical to address some of these capability and capacity demands.
But what does that actually mean for your firm? Is your organization one of the 25% of firms who are doing 65% of the hiring this year? Does your litigation profile include matters that will demand collection from social media tools? How does Judge Pecks ruling in the Da Silva Moore case and plaintiffs' subsequent request for the Judges recusal affect your decision to purchase or use predictive coding technology? And lastly, how does this impact your case load and ESI volume bottom line?
In our latest Critical Trends Survey, we have compiled several questions to measure how these issues are impacting your firm and more importantly, your career. We will be using the information learned in this online questionnaire as a part of our overall effort to help decision makers and senior professionals keep abreast of how these trends affect our market and their need for talent as they make investments in technology and process.
We cant wait to catch up with you during our Q2 events to discuss the preliminary results. Well also be re-evaluating this information and reporting our findings quarterly, so be sure to visit the Critical Trends Survey at various points during the year. If we are missing a question or havent addressed a topic you think is critical, please feel free to contact us at research@cowengroup.com.
See you at breakfast!
The following article is written by Greg Harris as a contributer to the eDiscovery Journal, based on notes taken during The Cowen Group's Leadership Breakfast hosted in Atlanta on March 1, 2012. [ Link to Original ]
The guest list for the morning event included forty professionals with responsibilities ranging from Litigation Support staff and eDiscovery Technologists to Staff Attorneys and Partners in large law firms. Some of the industries represented in the discussion were:
David Cowen, Managing Partner at The Cowen Group, started the morning by asking each participant to introduce themselves, and define their biggest challenge with regards to people, process and technology. Over eighty percent of the answers revolved around “people”, though the context was different. For some, their challenge is finding the right people to build their eDiscovery team. Do they hire from the outside, or build a team within the organization.
Another angle for the people challenge is being able to set appropriate expectations. Technologists find it difficult to explain how long a project will take, or how difficult the task is. The problem is that the technologist is trying to explain a very technical process at a high-level, and information is lost in the translation. The attorney or manager does not necessarily understand how long the collection and processing will take. One analogy was that we live in the “Google world”, where everything is indexed, and searchable on a moment’s notice. If only that were true for eDiscovery.
Mr. Cowen began writing on a marker board in front of the room, and explained how the eDiscovery field has evolved over the last 8 years. In 2004, we had little to no understanding of what eDiscovery encompassed. From 2004 to 2008, over 10,000 positions were added to the eDiscovery workforce. Between 2010 and 2011, the industry became established, which brings us to where we are today. Now that the industry has matured to some point, where do we go from here? Not all companies do eDiscovery the same way. Some corporations have created in-house teams with highly technical people. These teams are able to cover the full spectrum of the EDRM, which results in significant savings for the corporation. Other companies handle collection, but outsource processing and review. The rest simply outsource eDiscovery in its entirety.
Because there are so many different ways to handle eDiscovery, how do companies go about hiring? What does an eDiscovery professional look like? A resume gives a list of skills, and a work history, but it does not give much insight into how a candidate will fit with the team. One member of the panel said, “I can teach the skills, but I cannot change the personality.” Hiring managers around the room shared some of their favorite interview questions. Without giving away too much detail, the questions involved turtles, fairy tales and other abstract thoughts. Of course, this challenge is not unique to eDiscovery. The point is that every company has a different need for their eDiscovery team, and that hiring managers need to look for passion and intellect when selecting their candidates. You can teach the skills.
Mr. Cowen moved the discussion into Executive Development, and how managers can make more time for themselves, while developing their staff. First, be proactive. Have regular conversations with people that you can learn from. This can include mentors, peers, and even your staff. This is especially true in eDiscovery as some of us were grandfathered in during the time from 2004 to 2010. Next, focus on who you need for your team. Look for the right people, with the right talent, and the level of competency that you need. The “people” part of this goes back to finding the right personality for your team. The “talent” part could be anything from a computer programmer to a paralegal – it just depends on how your organization plans to run its eDiscovery function. Finally, the “competency” part goes back to the idea that you can teach the skills. As long as you find people that fit your organization, with the right level of talent and competency, you can teach the skills.
Once you have developed a team that has the “capability” to run the eDiscovery function, you have the “capacity” to focus on executive development. This gives you more time to have conversations with your peers in the industry – to learn something new, or get a sense of how the other firms are doing it. Mr. Cowen’s point here is that every time you develop capabilities in your team, you give yourself capacity to take on new tasks, or focus on growth.
[ Original article can be found here: http://ediscoveryjournal.com/2012/03/the-cowen-group-leadership-breakfast-atlanta-march-2012/ ]
The following article is written by Greg Harris as a contributer to the eDiscovery Journal, based on notes taken during The Cowen Group's Signature Dinner hosted in Atlanta on March 1, 2012. [ Link to Original Article ]
The guest list for the evening included sixteen professionals with responsibilities ranging from an eDiscovery technologist and an Enterprise Architect to a Vice President of Security Compliance and a College Professor. Some of the industries represented in the discussion were:
David Cowen, Managing Partner at The Cowen Group, started the evening by asking each participant to introduce themselves, and define their biggest challenge. Answers covered the spectrum from identity management and information governance to Payment Card Industry (PCI) requirements and how to protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII). One common theme from all of the answers was the volume of data, and how to manage it.
What is data? To some of the companies, data is not viewed as an asset; it is simply a byproduct of doing business. To other companies, such as the credit monitoring firm, data is “the only asset.” A current industry buzzword is “big data.” Companies hold massive amounts of data, and if they are able to develop ways to analyze it, they can learn a lot about their customer base, and make meaningful forecasts. However, regardless of how the company views data and its usefulness, it is a liability, and accidental disclosure can lead to regulatory fines, and public embarrassment.
Eventually, the discussion turned to email archival and data retention policies. Several of the participants indicated that their organizations either have an archival solution in place, or are in the process of implementation. The question is – how much email do you keep? Of course, some industries are bound by regulatory requirements to preserve email and other records for a number of years. But what about the non-business related email? One company allows their custodians to use folders in the archival system to store email based on the type of data (e.g. financial, legal, medical, etc.). In this scenario, the onus is on the custodian to determine whether or not to preserve the email… even if a legal matter does not exist. The company needs to have a well-defined data retention policy for the custodians to follow, and the policy must be socialized regularly to encourage compliance.
When defining, or refining an information governance policy, organizations need to consider the employee. How do you train people to adopt information governance policies and processes without violating their sense of autonomy and privacy? By highlighting the level of intimate access the enterprise has to an employee's at-work communications, the employee may feel that they are not trusted, and morale will begin to break down.
Opinions on data retention ranged from “delete everything as soon as possible,” to “keep everything forever.” The first opinion takes the minimalist approach in that you only store what you absolutely need, or are required to preserve. Using this methodology, an organization would limit its exposure in future litigation, but run the risk of purging vital evidence. The person with the “keep everything forever” opinion works for a company that uses a certain web-based email service, which is hosted by a firm that specializes in search. The idea here is that all of their email is indexed, and readily searched on short notice. For those of us that host our email internally, this is not a viable option.
Another interesting question was, “is there a worthwhile conversation to be had around the governance of information within the EDRM, with a specific goal of reducing redundant collection, processing, hosting, and review?” Email archival solutions can help by de-duplicating email collections. Some forensic collection tools, which now have an eDiscovery focus, provide the ability to exclude known files from a collection based on a hash value. Collaboration tools provide a central repository for project documentation, and could be used as the system of record, rather than collecting the same documents from numerous laptops.
Whether the data comes from email, documents, or other sources, companies need to address containment and destruction. eDiscovery teams are faced with an ever-expanding amount of data to identify, collect, process, search and produce. Mail servers are full of redundant, obsolete and trivial data, which only serve to slow the eDiscovery process. In order to reduce the amount of effort involved, eDiscovery teams should find a seat at the table so they can help shape data retention in their organization. Fortunately, Cowen noted that “After 3-5 years of investments in people, process, technology, and policy to control the cost of eDiscovery, executives at sophisticated corporations and law firms have more clarity into the business metrics and operational pains that justify budget for information governance programs.”
[ Original article can be found here: http://ediscoveryjournal.com/2012/03/the-cowen-group-signature-dinner-%E2%80%93-atlanta-%E2%80%93-march-2012/ ]