Last year at Legaltech New York I spoke to an in-house attorney about one of her worst days on the job. She was hard at work on litigation related to a compliance breach. The breach had occurred because the compliance staff mistakenly believed that a particular regulation did not apply to their business unit. There had been an internal investigation of the incident, but she was having difficulty verifying the steps the company had taken because the records were in disarray. Some of the investigation files were incorrectly moved into an unrelated archive, while other activities were undocumented altogether.

While trying to navigate the morass, she received a mass email from a colleague instructing everyone, incorrectly, that a certain regulation – yes, the very same one now making my friend’s life so difficult – was not applicable to the company. She feared that another breach could result and that she’d have to go through the process all over again.

Fortunately, the embattled attorney was able to quickly contact the right colleague and have a correction sent out. But she was understandably frustrated by the difficulties she’d encountered, particularly because she