Weekly Trends Report – 7/24/2019 Insights

Insight into where e-discovery, information governance cybersecurity, and digital transformation are heading – who is doing what now or in the future, what works and what doesn’t, and what people wish they could do but can’t – gleaned from recent publications

ABOVE THE FOLD

Join Mary Mack and me for a new ACEDS webinar series, Monthly Insights with George & Mary, starting Wed. Aug. 7

Relativity Fest Oct. 20-23 – Join us this fall at Relativity Fest in Chicago where I will be speaking on three sessions:  LIE291972 – Is It Time to Rethink the EDRM?; PD311742 – A Call to Action: Building an e-Discovery Pro Bono Platform and Network; and PR311751 – Let’s Take This Online: Managing Mobile Data in Relativity Short Message Discovery.

ELECTRONIC DISCOVERY

Office 365 video series – Tom O’Connor of the Gulf Legal Tech Center and Rachi Messing of Microsoft are putting on a video series on the e-discovery features in Office 365. Each episode is a little under ½ hour long. Episodes so far, including the newest, Part 8, are:

• Office 365 – Part 1 – eDiscovery Overview
• Office 365 – Part 2 – Information Governance
• Office 365 – Part 3 – Litigation Holds
• Office 365 – Part 4 – Collection and Processing
• Office 365 – Part 5 – Search
• Office 365 – Part 6 – Search Part 2
• Office 365 – Part 7 – Analytics
• Office 365 – Part 8 – Export

More on the challenges of emojis – Samantha Murphy Kelly of CNN wrote an article about the increasing appearance of emojis in court cases and the challenges they pose to judges, citing numbers from Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman (33 reported cases with emojis as evidence in 2017, 53 in 2018, and 50 in the first half of 2019). While there are more than 2,823 emojis set by the Unicode Consortium, courts have not yet developed guidelines on how they should be approached.

Ethical e-discovery – In an ACEDS post, Peter Borella of Trustpoint discussed how lawyers retained in matters involving e-discovery meet their ethical obligations under the New York Rules of Professional Conduct.

CYBERSECURITY & DATA PRIVACY

CCPA –

• Crunch Time in California – CCPA Amendments Hotly Debated and (Some) Defeated – Employee Data Is Back, Reasonable Definition of Personal Information Is Gone (For Now), and More!
  Alan Charles Raul and Sheri Porath Rockwell (Sidley) (July 15)
• A Closer Look at California Privacy Law Bar on Two Contract Clauses
  Alexis Miller Buese and Rachel Goldberg (Sidley) (July 16)
• Back At The Negotiating Table: CCPA Amendments Debate Continues
  David Kessler, Jeewon Kim Serrato, Susan Ross, and Anna Rudawski (Norton Rose Fulbright) (July 16)
• Potential Changes to the CCPA; California Senate Considers Amendments
  David Keating and Dorian Simmons (Alston & Bird) (July 17)
• CCPA Amendments – Employees and the Loyalty Program Change Nobody is Talking About
  John Tomaszewski and Jason Priebe (Seyfarth Shaw) (July 18)
• CCPA Creates Possible Dilemmas for Companies Sending Text Messages. Is Your Business Ready?
  (Womble Bond Dickinson) (July 18)

New York Privacy Act presumed dead – On July 17 Alysa Zeltzer Hutnik and Lauren Myers of Kelley Drye reported that New York’s efforts to pass the New York Privacy Act, SB5642, have failed, leaving the CCPA as the only comprehensive privacy state statute. The next day, Kramer Levin published an Alert discussing the bill and stating that its future is unclear.

New York SHIELD Act awaits governor’s signature – In the same Alert, Kramer Levin noted that New York’s Stop Hacks and Improve Electronic Data Security Handling (SHIELD) Act, which updates New York’s data breach laws, passed the state senate and assembly and awaits the governor’s signature.

ePrivacy Regulation update – Melinda McLellan and Kyle Fath of BakerHostetler wrote that the Council of the European Union’s ePrivacy Regulation likely will not be implemented before late 2021, and discussed key concepts of the regulation up for debate and the subject of amendments. Adoption of the regulation, introduced in 2017 and originally slated to go into effect with the GDPR, may be delayed even further due to changes in oversight of the Council. According to the New York State Senate site, the bill is in committee, having been referred to Consumer Protection on May 9.

COPPA Rule comments sought – As Alysa Zeltzer Hutnik and Lauren Myers of Kelley Drye reported, the FTC announced on July 17 that it is seeking comment on the effectiveness of amendments the FTC made to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule) in 2013 and whether additional changes are needed. The COPPA rule went into effect in 2000 to implement the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The public comment period is open for 90 days after notice is published in the Federal Register.

OIPC (Ontario) annual privacy report – Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner has released his 2018 Annual Report: Privacy and Accountability for a Digital Ontario. The 44-page report recommends initiatives to enhance access to information and protection of privacy in Ontario, including a call to modernize Ontario’s privacy laws to address risks posed by smart city technologies. For a summary, see the post written by Ruth Promislow and Katherine Rusk of Bennett Jones.

Data security management in China – Xinlan Liu of Perkins Coie prepared an overview of the draft Measures for Data Security Management published for public comment in May by the Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs of China (official Chinese version and unofficial English translation). These measures, along with other recent draft measures (including the Measures for Network Security Review, the Regulations for the Network Protection of Children’s Personal Information and the Measures for Safety Assessment on Cross-Border Transfer of Personal Information) would be the supporting documents of the Network Security Law.

Can anonymized data truly be anonymous? – Alex Hern of The Guardian reported that according to a recent study, successfully anonymizing data is practically impossible for any complex dataset. Researchers Luc Rocher, Julien M. Hendrickx, and Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye from Université catholique de Louvain and Imperial College London wrote, in the abstract to their Nature Communications article Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models, that “Using our model, we find that 99.98% of Americans would be correctly re-identified in any dataset using 15 demographic attributes. Our results suggest that even heavily sampled anonymized datasets are unlikely to satisfy the modern standards for anonymization set forth by GDPR and seriously challenge the technical and legal adequacy of the de-identification release-and-forget model.”

NIST mobile device security publication – The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published a draft version of Mobile Device Security Corporate-Owned Personally-Enabled (COPE), a 351-page practice guide that focuses on the challenge of securing mobile devices within an enterprise. The document is organized into three volumes:

• Volume A: Executive Summary
• Volume B: Approach, Architecture, and Security Characteristics – consisting of a summary; section on how to use the guide, approach, architecture, security characteristic analysis, and future build considerations; and eight glossaries
• Volume C: How-to Guides – consisting of an introduction, nine product installation guides, and three appendices

LEGAL TECHNOLOGY & DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

CLOC survey results – CLOC has published a 26-page report with results and analysis of its 2019 State of the Industry survey. CLOC looked at information about corporate legal departments gathered from over 200 companies of various sizes in over 30 industries and 18 countries. The report covers legal expenditures, legal department headcount, technology and innovation, and law firm evaluations. Dan Clark of Legaltech News and Richard Tromans of Artificial Lawyer both reported on the results.

AI regulation – Sharon Nelson of Sensei Enterprises noted that the Law Library of Congress released a report, Regulation of Artificial Intelligence in Selected Jurisdictions, that looks at AI regulation and policy in jurisdictions around the world.

More activity on the contract front – From Richard Tromans of Artificial Lawyer:

• LexisNexis Moves Into Doc Analysis With Axiom Spin-Off Knowable (July 18)
• Strategic Differences: LexisNexis Backs Doc Analysis, As TR Moves Away (July 19)
• Wilson Sonsini Joins $4.2m Investment In Lexion AI Contract Analysis Startup (July 22)
• Clyde & Co Picks US-Based AI Co. NVT For Large Scale Doc Analysis (July 24)

New brief analysis tools – Bob Ambrogi of LawSites called attention in articles on his site and Above the Law to two new brief-analysis tools, Quick Check from Thomson Reuters, which Bob also looked at here, and Bloomberg Law’s forthcoming Brief Analyzer, which Bob discussed in an earlier post.

LawFest 2019 presentations – Slides and videos from LawFest 2019, held in New Zealand last March, are available on line:

• Slides:
  • But I’m not a robot! (Simon Tupman)
  • The future-ready legal business (Sam Nickless)
  • Re-imagine legal: Client-centered innovation (Lisa Leong and Tristan Forrester)
  • Exploring global innovations in the delivery of legal services (Renee Knake)
  • Innovation, productivity and wellbeing: Creating environments that enable legal teams to excel (Caroline Ferguson)
  • Innovating your in-house legal operations (Helen Mackay and Matt Farrington)
  • Digital disruption for professional services (Scott McLiver and Robbie Gimblett)
  • Strategy on a page (Simon Tupman)
  • Legal innovation: Where do I begin and how do I do it? (Samy Mansour)
• Videos:
  • Thinking differently (Jane Parker and Jean Yang)
  • Practical use of AI for lawyers (Julian Uebergang)
  • GDPR: The missing piece (Liz Scott-Wilson)
  • Disrupting the law (Mai Chen)
  • The weakest link: Hacking the human (Craig Columbus)
  • The LawFest great debate
  • Q&A panel
  • Innovation in a disruptive world (Sir Ray Avery)
  • Why lawyers should care about blockchain (Mark Pascall)

ANNOUNCEMENTS

ADDITIONAL ARTICLES

 UPCOMING EVENTS

Conferences, webinars, and the like can provide insight into where e-discovery, information governance cybersecurity, and digital transformation are heading

7/25/2018-8/23/2019 EVENTS

George Socha

Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal

George Socha is the Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, where he promotes brand awareness, helps guide development of product roadmap and consults with customers on effective deployment of legal technology.

Named an “E-Discovery Trailblazer” by The American Lawyer, George has assisted corporate, law firm, and government clients with all facets of electronic discovery, including information governance, domestically and globally. He served clients in a variety of industries including pharmaceutical, energy, retail, banking and technology, among others. As a renowned industry thought leader, he has authored more than 50 articles and spoken at more than 200 engagements across the world on a variety of e-discovery topics. His extensive knowledge has also been utilized more than 20 times to provide expert testimony.

Co-founder of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), a framework that outlines the standards for the recovery and discovery of digital data, and the Information Governance Reference Model (IGRM), a similar framework specific to information management, George is skilled at developing and implementing electronic discovery strategies and managing electronic discovery processes.