Extract from Amit Dungarani’s article “How to Overcome eDiscovery, Compliance, and Risk (ECR) Challenges with Casepoint’s Legal Ops Maturity Model”
Key Challenges Facing Legal Departments
Corporations are literally buried in data – most of it either redundant, obsolete, or trivial (ROT). While much of that data is unknown (i.e., “dark data”), eliminating “useless” data is not straightforward.
Add to it the complexity of protecting data under existing and newly arising privacy laws juxtaposed with the dramatic rise in ransomware and other cyber-attacks, the number of organizational risks has risen dramatically and thus putting more pressure on corporations to manage and reduce those risks.
These trends and changes within the corporate environment have led to a growing number of use cases for eDiscovery technology and workflows. While the traditional use for eDiscovery technology has been litigation, additional use cases have emerged to support investigations, audits, data privacy requests, incident response requests, and even HSR Second Requests to support mergers and acquisitions.
Key operational challenges facing legal departments today can be summarized within three broad categories:
- Effective Governance of data within the organization and addressing the challenges associated with the advent of “Big Data”
- Increased requirements for Compliance with data privacy laws and regulations
- Increased Risk associated with increased cyberattacks on corporations today.
These challenges have increased the number of discovery use cases to support legal departments and legal operations’ needs today. For corporate legal departments to address these challenges efficiently and effectively, it requires an operations-oriented approach, which emphasizes the importance of legal operations (“legal ops”) in corporations today.