The professionals within corporate legal departments (CLDs) might be the living embodiment of knowledge workers: people whose main capital is knowledge and whose line of work requires them to “think for a living.”

Like a variety of other organizations centered around knowledge workers, CLDs are under pressure to find a way to work more efficiently, innovate faster, and get the most from their employees’ expertise. To get that edge and stay ahead, every resource counts – but in too many organizations, knowledge remains a valuable, yet untapped, asset.

There are several reasons why.

First among these is the challenge of simply finding documents. Knowledge workers report they spend an inordinate amount of time searching for specific pieces of content that are scattered and siloed across multiple systems. The information stored in documents holds tremendous potential, but that potential can’t be activated if workers are too overwhelmed to make the most of information spread between disparate sources, or don’t even know where to look.

Another key factor impacting the ability of organizations to truly tap into their knowledge is the remote workforce transformation that has taken place in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Upwork estimates that by 2025, 36.2 million
Continue Reading Tapping into Your Knowledge Assets

The world has changed a lot since our 2020 report. A global pandemic; an ongoing reckoning on race, inequality and social justice; a climate crisis; an economic shock; and increased political polarization have created challenging dynamics for companies and boards globally.
Continue Reading A Brave New World: Top 10 Topics for Directors in 2021

Charlie Platt, Director of Data Analytics for iDS, resumes his Ethical Hacker column with a piece on how reducing cyber risk can get in the way of your business – that is, if your rules lack flexibility. The best way to implement successful cyber risk programs without hurting your business, he says, is to design them to adapt to dynamic business requirements by providing an approved exception process.

It’s been a while since I’ve been on these pages. I’ve missed it and it’s good to be back. One big change is that I’m now also focused on data analytics in addition to cybersecurity. I will be heading up the Data Analytics practice at iDS and Robert Kirtley is heading up the Cybersecurity practice. Together we will be talking about how data analytics and cybersecurity go hand in hand, and how we can assist each other in achieving great results for our clients.

In light of that new focus, I’d like to tell you about a project I recently worked on for a client. While on the surface our work was focused on data, there were strong undercurrents of cybersecurity throughout the project. We were engaged to assist the client
Continue Reading The Ethical Hacker: Can Reducing Risk Be Bad for Us?

An annotated review of Information Governance Insights columns from 2017

The scope of corporate counsel duties has changed rather rapidly and drastically in the past decade. As companies have quickly begun to digitalize nearly every aspect of their operations, digital information has become the lifeblood and primary asset of nearly all business, in every industry, in every sector. Whether a company makes or sells widgets, transports goods or people, facilitates markets or financial transactions, or provides services of any sort, in the past few years it has also become an information business. The volume of digital information flowing through companies has also grown exponentially in this same short period.
Continue Reading Information Governance Insights: Taking Control of the Data Mountains