The 2017 NorCal Information Governance Retreat was held by Ing3nious at the Quail Lodge & Golf Club in Carmel Valley, California.  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.  I’ve posted additional photos here.

The intro to the round table discussions included some comments on the evolution of the Internet, the importance of searching for obscenities to find critical documents or to identify data that has been scrubbed (it is implausible that there are no emails containing obscenities for a failing project), the difficulty of searching for “IT” (meaning information technology rather than the pronoun), and the inability of many tools to search for emojis.

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

How Well Can Your Organization Protect Against Encrypted Traffic Threats?
I couldn’t attend this

IG Analytics And Infonomics: The Future Is Now
I couldn’t attend this

Breaches Happen. Going On The Cyber Offense With Deception
Breach stories that were mentioned included Equifax, Target, an employee that built their own (insecure) tunnel to get data out to their home, and an employee that carried data out on a microSD card.  In the RSA / Lockheed Martin breach, a Lockheed contractor was fooled by a phishing email, illustrating how hard it is to keep attackers out.  Email is a very common source of breaches.  A big mistake is not knowing that you’ve been breached.  People put honeypots outside the firewall to detect attacks. It’s better to use deception technology, which puts decoys inside the firewall.

Social Media And Website Information Governance
There has been some regulation of social media, especially for certain industries.  The SEC in 2012 required financial institutions to archive it.  The FTC has been enforcing paid endorsement disclosure guidelines (e.g., Kim Kardashian’s endorsement of a morning sickness drug).  Collecting evidence from social media is tricky.  A screenshot could be photoshopped, so how to prove it is legitimate?  Should collect a screenshot, source code, meta data, and a digital signature with time stamp.  Corporate policy on social media use will depend on the kind of company and the industry it is in.  There should also be a policy on monitoring employee’s social media use.  Companies using an internal social media system are asking for problems.  How will they police/discipline improper usage?  If an employee posts “Why haven’t I seen John lately?” and another replies that John has cancer, you have a problem.  Does a company social media system really improve productivity?  Can you find out who posted something anonymously on public social media?  If they posted from Starbucks or a library, probably not (finding the IP address won’t reveal the person’s identity).  This strategy worked for a bad review of a doctor that was thought to be from another doctor: 1) file in Federal court and get a court order to get the user’s IP address from the social media website, 2) go back to the judge and get a court order to get the ISP to give the identity of the person using that IP address at that time, 3) there is a motion to quash, which confirms that the right person was found (otherwise wouldn’t bother to fight it).

Bridging The Gap Between Inside And Outside Counsel: Next Generation Strategies For Collaborating On Complex Litigation Matters
I couldn’t attend this

Preventing Inadvertent Disclosure In A Multi-Language World
Start by identifying teams and process.  Be aware of cultural differences.  Be aware of technological issues — there are 2 or 3 alternatives to MS Word that you might encounter for documents in Korean.  Be aware of laws against removing certain documents from the country.  There was disagreement among panel members about whether review quality of foreign documents was better in the U.S. due to reviewers better understanding U.S. law.  Viewing a document in the U.S. that is stored on a server in the E.U. is not a valid work-around for restrictions on exporting the documents.  Review in the U.S. is much cheaper than reviewing overseas (about 1/5 to 1/10 of the cost).  Violation of GDPR puts 4% of revenue at risk, but a U.S. judge may not care.  Take only what you need out of the country.  Many tools work best when they are analyzing documents in a single language, so use language identification and separate documents by language before analysis.  TAR may not work as well for non-English documents, but it does work.

What’s Your Trust Point?
I couldn’t attend this

Legal Tech And AI – Inventing The Future
Humans are better than computers at handling low-probability outlier events, because there is a lack of training data to teach machines to handle such things.  It is important for the technology to be easy for the user to interact with.  Legal clients are very cost averse, so a free trial of new tech is attractive.

The Cloud, New Technologies And Other Developments In Trade Secret Theft
I couldn’t attend this

Are You Prepared For The Impact Of Changing EU Data Privacy On U.S. Litigation?
I couldn’t attend this

IG Policy Pain Points In E-Discovery
Deletion of data that is not on hold 60 days after an employee leaves the company may not get everything since other custodians may have copies.  You may find that employees have archived their emails on a local hard drive.  Be clear about data ownership — wiping the phone of an employee that left the company may hit their personal data.  The general counsel is often not involved in decisions like BYOD (treated as an IT decision), but they should be.  Realize that having more data about employee behavior (e.g., GPS tracking) makes the company more responsible.  You rarely need the employee’s phone since there is little data cached there (data is on mail servers, etc.).  You should do info governance compliance testing to ensure that employees are following the procedures.  Policies must be realistic — there won’t be perfect separation of work and personal activity.  Flouted rules may be worse than no rules.  Keep personal data separate (personal folder, personal email address, use phone for accessing Facebook).  When doing an annual cleanup, what about the data from the employee who left the company?  A study showed that 85% of stored data is rot.  Have a checklist that you follow when an employee leaves — don’t wipe the computer without copying stuff you may need.