Paper Chase. I remember the good old paper chase days (and have the repetitive wrist and forearm injuries as a constant reminder). We would sift through boxes and binders, making three copy sets, with ruler, highlighter and Sharpie in hand for document review and redaction. When you are fresh out of school on your first gig, the free dinners were worth the wait to review and redact into the night. The terror of a senior partner blowing through the war room frantically looking for documents and throwing the binders that my fellow newbies and I neatly stacked for the next day made the free dinners seem a little like getting short changed. Oh the good old days of paper litigation.
It’s Not Just Email and Paper Anymore. Email changed the game, and the new way of getting carpal tunnel was upon us – clicking for NR, R, and P. It paid the bills for sure, and there was no shortage of doc review gigs. The real game changer was the sheer volume when converting GBs to paper. Printing the data out into three sets for manual review and redaction made the legal copy vendors a pretty penny, but it was simply unsustainable, i.e., the definition of “square peg in a round hole”. Document review platform companies began to emerge and rules of civil procedure adjusted for the new age of eDiscovery.
Just as email changed the landscape of litigation, unstructured data (and lots of it, everywhere) is changing how legal and compliance teams do their jobs today. Unstructured data in the form of paper is not new, and when it includes dispersed data sources beyond your control (thanks Covid) and data types beyond what you learned in law school (hint: not everything is a .doc), just finding data can be a costly and time-consuming affair.
WFH and Data Sprawl. Business teams have rapidly adopted cloud productivity applications, accelerated by Covid and WFH. Paper and files continue to be part of business, and custom databases accessible only by internal teams continue to be the norm. Those sources coupled with new enterprise cloud applications, make finding legal data time-consuming, costly, and dependent on internal and external resources.
Self-Service Legal Gold, Please. A self-service source of truth for gold legal data has never been more relevant to address the productivity, costs, and risk challenges that come with modern businesses. More than 80% of enterprise data is unstructured, and most legal work depends on this data. Bringing the data sprawl into a single unified view that is secure and built for the enterprise, enabled by highly performant queries and access controls is literally a game-changer for legal teams. Legal departments are at an inflection point, where there is an opportunity to leverage data to enable rather than inhibit business. One gold store for legal data will not only drive productivity, it will reduce costs and risks.