Modern & Emerging Data Sources (Part 1): Introducing the Future of Discovery

Over the course of the last few years, we have been particularly excited about the growth and evolution of technology throughout  society. The speed of innovation and the level of natural adoption into daily life and work is really amazing. Worldwide, professionals are collaborating and communicating using a variety of technologies and nimbly navigating between them. Businesses, households and individuals are enjoying the benefits and motivation spurred on by devices that collect and communicate information about everything.

While these concepts are in the news every day and being rigorously addressed from a variety of commercial and academic angles, these milestones in this great era of information acceleration present the legal services and technology industries with challenges that require specific attention not widely available. In particular, the rate of innovation, adoption and replacement in communications technologies creates an ongoing conflict with effective litigation readiness, discovery response planning, data identification, preservation and collection.

One of the essential functions of effective legal technology solutions in our industry involves bringing order and consistency to disparate sources of electronic information so it makes sense to lawyers. At KLDiscovery, we have particular expertise in the secure collection, transformation, mining, prioritization and production of electronic data by taking many different types of data and using technology to uniformly align the data in a unified database  for lawyers to meet their obligations and build their case.

At one point in modern history, this was fairly difficult for most to accomplish because the technology and tough lessons were developing. For a moment in ediscovery history, it seemed like the industry had it largely figured out, because so many organizations coalesced around a relatively manageable ecosystem of increasingly familiar data sources. Of course, there have always been outliers and exceptions. Nevertheless, we’ve honed our expertise in processing, reporting, development and application integration to address the major use cases, as well as the anomalies. Today, our industry is amidst an environment of perpetual innovation, adoption and replacement unlike any before. During this period and into the foreseeable future, we need to carefully consider the legal, technical and practical impacts of these trends because they present a greater tendency to continually shift the status quo, making discovery more difficult, unpredictable, case-specific and risky.

As a simple example, more and more people are taking advantage of new communication technologies at work outside of email. A myriad of chat applications, Office 365 collaboration tools, Slack, Symphony, Workplace by Facebook, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are prime examples. In the future, we will examine what makes these modes of communications different, which professions are using the latest collaboration tools and to what degree. Our forward-leaning approach to this discussion will explore technology and discovery implications that will impact us for years to come and equip you for informed success in discovery and information management.