​The legal technology startups weren’t letting anything keep them away from Legaltech New York this year. Despite blizzards, arctic cold temperatures, hundreds of flight delays and cancellations, the legal tech startups not only showed up, but they made their presence known.
 
MT>3 spent two days at Legaltech meeting with some of the brightest minds in the industry who are breaking new ground with their innovative legal technologies. Both the new and lesser known legal tech companies wowed us with their leading-edge technology solutions and roadmaps for the future. These technologies are solving the e-Discovery, investigation and data governance issues that have plagued the industry for years, as well as solving problems we didn’t even know existed.
 
MT>3 is excited about implementing some of these new and ground-breaking solutions to bring the world of e-Discovery, investigations and data governance to a whole new level.

​On April 17, 2018, the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto hosted a panel discussion on privacy appropriately titled:  Big Data, Bigger Problems: Who Owns Your Data?  A lively discussion ensued revolving around recent privacy incidents and the influence that social media and the public perception of companies has to play in the privacy space.
Trust, as an overarching principle guiding business, was a recurring theme.  In addition to using data lawfully, organizations are well-advised to consider developing ethical and transparent policies to establish a relationship of trust with consumers. While legal consent continues to be generally required for organizations to collect and use one’s data, there appeared to be a consensus among the speakers and the participants on the increased importance of potential public reaction when planning the information lifecycle of a company’s data assets.

This importance of trust was emphasized as well this week in the Globe and Mail on April 15, where Dominic Fortin, CIO at district m, addressed the issue with clarity…

“ the challenge of building ethical and transparent frameworks that will contribute to establishing trust between consumers, service providers and advertisers, and make advertising a healthy part of society. Only if that challenge is met will we be able to trust corporations offering a free service to consumers, such as a social network, to generate their revenue from ethical and lawful use of the data they have gathered for advertising purposes.”

In today’s rapidly changing environment where public perception may be as important as regulatory oversight, applying a long-term, risk-based approach to the collection, use, storage and eventual deletion of personal information just makes business sense. 

The Information Governance Initiative (IGI) released “The State of Information Governance Report, Volume III on March 1, 2018 (SIGR-III).  Based on a survey of approximately 100,000 people who work in Information Governance (IG) in their organization, it reveals some key insights about the importance of IG and also a (perhaps) surprising increase in adoption of IG projects.  It seems an appropriate time to reflect on IG and how it can maximize value and reduce risk.
There is a growing recognition, reflected in the SIGR-III, that IG is one of the broadest categories of internal business activities.  It is usually described as subsuming compliance, E-Discovery, and privacy, for example.  IGI has developed a pinwheel infographic which depicts IG as touching upon all organizational activities and functions.

IG is not a product that an organization can simply purchase or install; it is a practice, similar to the risk-based approach that has emerged in compliance disciplines.  It is an ongoing way of doing business that becomes easier over time but really has no end.  Its lifecycle moves through many stages: evaluation, collection, measurement, analysis, development, implementation, evaluation, reporting, training and finally audit.
​
The goal of all this is to move away from an ad hoc system where individual users decide how information is to be generated, used, valued, shared, stored and deleted.  The ad hoc approach is fraught with risk.  By managing and optimizing an organization’s IG system we move to one that is designed to maximize value and minimize risk.  In other words, “IG by Design”.
SIGR-III demonstrates that business has got the message.  Some of the key findings include:
 
VAST INCREASE IN IG PROJECTS - the number of respondents who have never undertaken an IG project dropped by a whopping 90% in one year resulting in only 2% of respondents never having undertaken an IG project;
ORGANIZATIONS REALIZING VALUE - the number of organizations reporting that they are extracting business value from the information they hold has increased by 30% to 46%;
TONE FROM THE TOP – senior executives are getting more involved;
CYBERSECURITY CONNECTION – organizations are increasingly aware that IG is “essential to strong cybersecurity”.
 
SIGR-III describes a business world that is changing rapidly and starting to get a hold on the reality that effective information governance is no longer an option.  It is a business necessity.