The 2017 South Central Information Governance Retreat was the first retreat in the Ing3nious series held in Texas at the La Cantera Resort & Spa.  The retreat featured two simultaneous sessions throughout the day.  My notes below provide some highlights from the sessions I was able to attend.

The day started with roundtable discussions that were kicked off by a speaker who talked about the early days of the Internet.  He made the point that new lawyers may know less about how computers actually work even though they were born in an era when they are more pervasive.  He mentioned that one of the first keyword searches he performs when he receives a production is for “f*ck.”  If a company was having problems with a product and there isn’t a single email using that word, something was surely withheld from the production.  He made the point that expert systems that are intended to replace lawyers must be based on how the experts (lawyers) actually think.  How do you identify the 50 documents that will actually be used in trial?

Borrowing Agile Development Concepts To Jump-Start Your Information Governance Program
I couldn’t attend this

Your Duty To Preserve: Avoiding Traps In Troubled Times
When storing data in the cloud, what is actually retained?  How can you get the data out?  Google Vault only indexes newly added emails, not old ones.  The company may not have the right to access employee data in the cloud.  One panelist commented that collection is preferred to preservation in place.

Enhancing eDiscovery With Next Generation Litigation Management Software
I couldn’t attend this one.

Leveraging The Cloud & Technology To Accelerate Your eDiscovery Process
Cloud computing seems to have reached an inflection point.  A company cannot put the resources into security and data protection that Amazon can.  The ability to scale up/down is good for litigation that comes and goes.  Employees can jump into cloud services without the preparation that was required for doing things on site.  Getting data out can be hard.  Office 365 download speed can be a problem (2-3 GB/hr) — reduce data as much as possible.

Strategies For Effectively Managing Your eDiscovery Spend
I couldn’t attend this one.

TAR: What Have We Learned?
I moderated this panel, so I didn’t take notes.

Achieving GDPR Compliance For Unstructured Content
I couldn’t attend this one.

Zen & The Art Of Multi-Language Discovery: Risks, Review & Translation
The translation company should be brought in when the team is formed (it often isn’t done until later).  Help may be needed from translator / localization expert to come up with search terms.  For example, there are 20 ways to say “CEO” in Korean.  Translation must be done by an expert to be certified.  When using TAR, do review in the native language and translate the result before presenting to the legal team.  Translation is much slower than review.  Machine translation has improved over the last 2 years, but it’s not good enough to rely on for anything important.  A translator leaked Toyota’s data to the press — keep the risk in mind and make sure you are informed about the environment where the work is being done (screenshots should be prohibited).

Beyond The Firewall: Cybersecurity & The Human Factor
I couldn’t attend this one.

Ethical Obligations Relating To Metadata
Nineteen states have enacted ethical rules on meta-data.  Sometimes, metadata is enough to tell the whole story.  John McAfee was found and arrested because of GPS coordinates embedded in a photo of him.  Metadata showed that a terminated whistleblower’s employee review was written 3 months after termination.  Forensic collection is important to not spoil the metadata.  Ethical obligations of attorneys are broader than attorney-client privilege.  Should attorneys be encrypting email?  Make the client aware of metadata and how it can be viewed.  The attorney must understand metadata and scrub it as necessary (e.g, change tracking in Word).  In e-discovery metadata is treated like other ESI.  Think about metadata when creating a protective order.  What are the ethical restrictions of viewing and mining metadata received through discovery?  Whether you need to disclose receipt of confidential or privileged metadata depends on the jurisdiction.

Legal Risks Associated With Failing To Have A Cyber Incident Response Plan
I couldn’t attend this one.

“Defensible Deletion” Is The Wrong Frame
Defensible deletion started with an IBM survey that found that on average 69% of corporate data has no value, 6% is subject to litigation hold, and 25% is useful.  IBM started offering to remove 45% of data without doing any harm to a company (otherwise, you don’t have to pay).  Purging requires effort, so make deletion the default.  Statistical sampling can be used to confirm that retention rules won’t cause harm.  After a company said that requested data wasn’t available because it had been deleted in accordance with the retention policy, an employee who was being deposed said he had copied everything to 35 CDs — it can be hard to ensure that everything is gone even if you have the right policy.