Thought Leadership and Industry Trends
In March 2020, as offices around the world closed due to the global pandemic, CDS transitioned to fully remote document reviews. One year later, we have learned many lessons about what works and where adjustments and improvements can still be made.
The pandemic has tested us personally, professionally and organizationally. Successfully transitioning to this new reality required certain immediate, practical adjustments that not every employee, leader or company could reasonably make.
The adversarial process, the diverse parties, novel fact patterns – every litigation, every investigation, every deal offers the practitioner a chance to refine their expertise, extend their capabilities and apply their skill set.
As you begin to build a strong foundation for technological competence through educational efforts, it is essential to gain further understanding and skills through experience. I break experience into two categories: engagement and application.
Competence is the ethical foundation upon which everything we do as lawyers is based. To be competent is to have the necessary ability, knowledge, or skill to do something successfully. Traditionally, lawyers do this by refining their specific areas of expertise and pursuing continuing legal education.
In March 2017, Microsoft launched its online chat and collaboration tool Microsoft Teams. By the end of 2018, ~3 million users utilized Teams on a daily basis, growing to ~44 million users by February 2020. Microsoft Teams wasn’t alone on its upward trajectory; competing applications such as Facebook Workplaces and Slack have seen similar growth.
In the U.S., the ABA has estimated that document review alone accounts for more than 80 percent of total litigation spend, totaling tens of billions of dollars per year. As data becomes more varied and complex and volumes increase, that number is only going to rise. The dominance of social media, the increased use of short form multichannel messaging platforms, and even the growing popularity of podcasts have only widened the scope of what is considered fair game for discovery.
The coronavirus is here and is impacting our daily routines. Organizations have responded by mandating that everyone works from home to be safe from exposure. Social distancing is the new norm. Virtually all businesses now must cope with managing a virtual workforce to some degree. That comes with new security risks for the data that businesses spend millions of dollars to protect.
As companies and law firms struggle with managing increasing amounts of data, cloud-based solutions are becoming an important option to consider. This year’s CDS Putting Insights Into Practice event had several panels focused on eDiscovery, including one focusing on the benefits of eDiscovery in the cloud. While many companies have moved at least some of their data to the cloud, when it comes to eDiscovery and its workflows there are additional advantages.
The blockchain concept can be applied to many types of transactions which has major implications for creating, storing and managing data.
Although advancements in legal technology have brought many benefits to the legal process, they have also made it more complex.
New changes in a workflow can be confusing. Our guide to four features updated with Relativity 9.6 will help users navigate this change.
