The 2017 Northeast Information Governance Retreat was held at the Salamander Resort & Spa in Middleburg, Virginia.  After round table discussions, the retreat featured two simultaneous sessions throughout the day. My notes below provide some highlights from the sessions I was able to attend.

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

Legal Tech and AI – Inventing The Future
Machines are currently only good a routine tasks.  Interactions with machines should allow humans and machines to do what they do best.  Some areas where AI can aid lawyers: determining how long litigation will take, suggesting cases you should reference, telling how often the opposition has won in the past, determining appropriate prices for fixed fee arrangements, recruiting, or determining which industry on which to focus.  AI promises to help with managing data (e.g., targeted deletion), not just e-discovery.  Facial recognition may replace plane tickets someday.

Zen & The Art Of Multi-Language Discovery: Risks, Review & Translation
I couldn’t attend this

NexLP Demo
The NexLP tool emphasizes feature extraction and use of domain knowledge from external sources to figure out the story behind the data.  It can generate alerts based on changes in employee behavior over time.  Company should have a policy allowing the scanning of emails to detect bad behavior.  It was claimed that using AI on emails is better for privacy than having a human review random emails since it keeps human eyes away from emails that are not relevant.

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

Are Managed Services Manageable?
I couldn’t attend this

Cyber And Data Security For The GC: How To Stay Out Of Headlines And Crosshairs
I couldn’t attend this

The Office Is Out: Preservation And Collection In The Merry Old LandOf Office 365
Enterprise 5 (E5) has advanced analytics from Equivio.  E3 and E1 can do legal hold but don’t have advanced analytics.  There are options available that are not on the website, and there are different builds — people are not all using the same thing.  Search functionality works on limited file types (e.g., Microsoft products).  Email attachments are OK if they are from Microsoft products.  It will not OCR PDFs that lack embedded text.  What about emails attached to emails?  Previously, it only went one layer deep on attachments.  Latest versions say they are “relaxing” that, but it is unclear what that means (how deep?).  User controls sync — are we really searching everything?  Make sure you involve IT, privacy, info governance, etc. if considering transition to 365.  Be aware of data that is already on hold if you migrate to 365.  Start by migrating a small group of people that are not often subject to litigation.  Test each data type after conversion.

How To Make Sense Of Information Governance Rules For Contractors When The Government Itself Can’t?
I couldn’t attend this

Judges, The Law And Guidance: Does ‘Reasonableness’ Provide Clarity?
This was primarily about the impact of the new Federal rules of civil procedure.  Clients are finally giving up on putting everything on hold.  Tie document retention to business needs — shouldn’t have to worry about sanctions.  Document everything (e.g., why you chose specific custodians to hold).  Accidentally missing one custodian out of a hundred is now OK.  Some judges acknowledge the new rules but then ignore them.  Boilerplate objections to discovery requests needs to stop — keep notes on why you made each objection.

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

The Theory of Relativity: Is There A Black Hole In Electronic Discovery?
The good about Relativity: everyone knows it, it has plug-ins, and moving from document to document is fast compared to previous tools.  The bad: TAR 1.0 (federal judiciary prefers CAL).  An audience member expressed concern that as Relativity gets close to having a monopoly we should expect high prices and a lack of innovation.  Relativity One puts kCura in competition with service providers.

The day ended with a wine social.