Leading the high performance law department
Interview with Alisa McLellan / Inventus
Alisa McLellan, a licensed attorney, is the director of project management for the Chicago and New York offices at Inventus. She and her team work with inside and outside counsel to manage large data-collection projects for both litigation and internal investigations. In this interview, Alisa shares strategies for managing highly effective and cost efficient e-discovery initiatives. Her remarks have been edited for length and style.
Article by Rees Morrison / Altman Weil
Law departments of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain with data analytics!
Your business is awash in numbers, along with software tools you can use to learn from them. You also have an important cadre of allies: Your key law firms have for years been stockpiling operational numbers about your work that will help you increase and demonstrate your department’s value to your company. But those firms need prodding to encourage them to mine their data for your benefit. That’s why you need to stay informed and involved.
The five imperatives below are the kinds of things you may want to say to your key firms. If you do, this manifesto gives you an easy way to deliver the message.
Continue Reading A Manifesto for Metrics: Law departments need to prod their outside counsel to use data more effectively
By Jason Mark Anderman / American Express Company
What if you and your counterparty possessed 100 percent certainty that every word and every signature in every contract you’ve negotiated were perfectly accurate? What if every payment obligation could be automatically enforced without human involvement? What if you could stack contractual duties in condition-precedent dominoes so that you automatically paid a supplier fee only after valid confirmation of goods delivery?
This is no fantasy. It’s the world offered by smart contracts today.
Article by Jeanne Somma / RVM Enterprises, Inc.
How we manage e-discovery is an ever-evolving thing. As the landscape changes, new trends constantly emerge that alter the way that corporations, law firms and service providers operate. Constant change is expected and necessary, given that data volumes continue to skyrocket. Coupled with stagnating and even declining litigation budgets, this means that the industry is ripe for yet another round of evolution.
Corporate legal departments have answered the call for change and realize that they must find new ways to control soaring costs. By thinking about where they came from, these departments have realized that years of litigation have given them one precious thing that may help – enough historical data to build tracking and prediction methods for the future.
Article by: Kyle Reykalin / FRONTEO
Conducting cost-effective and efficient e-discovery for Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigations involving U.S. and Japanese companies requires a rare combination of legal, cultural and technological skills. Here are seven common obstacles, and practical tips to help e-discovery teams overcome them.
1. Bridge dissimilar legal systems. It’s important to understand the differences between the two legal systems. Japanese in-house counsel are often surprised at the scope, expense and formality of the American discovery process, as well as the danger that their confidential business documents and strategies might be shared. American attorneys occasionally assume that the in-house legal departments of large Japanese corporations are familiar with uniquely American legal concepts, such as attorney-client privilege. Care must be taken to clearly explain the requirements of confidentiality, electronically stored information collection, the obligations of legal hold and other discovery concepts.
Article by: Charlie Platt / iDiscovery Solutions
I’ve written on this topic before, and despite the danger of sounding like a broken record, I will repeat myself: Cybersecurity is all about risk management. Many of you are likely working with your company’s chief information security officer (CISO) and security teams to help assess and control this cyberrisk. (At least I hope you are.) And one of the first things most security professionals recommend is taking an inventory of your IT assets. In fact, it’s embodied in the first Function of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework:
“The activities in the Identify Function are foundational for effective use of the Framework. Understanding the business context, the resources that support critical functions, and the related cybersecurity risks enables an organization to focus and prioritize its efforts, consistent with its risk management strategy and business needs. Examples of outcome Categories within this Function include: Asset Management; Business Environment; Governance; Risk Assessment; and Risk Management Strategy.”
Continue Reading Are You Accounting for One of Your Largest Cybersecurity Risks?
Interview with Scott Lefton/AccessData
Scott Lefton is a senior sales engineer at AccessData. Though he is not directly involved in conducting or supervising investigations, he spends a lot of time talking to the people who do, including chief security officers, people in HR and, of course, in-house lawyers. He listens to their “woes,” he said, and suggests software designed to help them. His remarks have been edited for length and style.
Interview with Teresa Lavoie / Fish & Richardson
Teresa Lavoie, a principal at Fish & Richardson, didn’t start out planning to practice law. Her background is in science, and her first quasi-legal position was working as a patent liaison at a biotech startup before she decided to attend law school. But that was obviously a good career move. She’s been working with startups ever since, and Lavoie has become one of the most sought-after life sciences patent attorneys in the world. The interview has been edited for style and length.
Kevin Caulfield, a product line director at Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, understands that general counsel don’t want their departments to be viewed solely as cost centers. Many of them strive to show how they can be good business partners with other parts of their organization by focusing on initiatives that will help reduce costs and generate revenue. To Caulfield, one of the ways this can be achieved is through enterprise legal management technology. Although many long-established corporate legal departments have already made good use of this technology, he says, there are many growing companies that still may not realize the benefits of an enterprise legal management solution. His remarks have been edited for length and style.
Ransomware. Just the word itself is enough to chill the hearts of everyone from personal users to IT professionals to senior executives. May 12th’s massive attack took down hundreds, perhaps thousands, of companies and unknown numbers of individuals and institutions, including the United Kingdom’s healthcare systems (with possible impacts including critical patient care and historical medical records).
Continue Reading How to Protect Your Company from Ransomware Attacks
