Advice from 5 Industry Experts: Improving Data Preservation and Information Governance

In the spring of 2021, Pagefreezer partnered with the Association of Corporate Counsel to examine how legal teams are dealing with new data sources, such as team collaboration tools (like Slack and Microsoft Teams) and video conferencing platforms (like Zoom).

Documentation and data in modern business are generated at a rapid pace, both on and offline. A wide variety of industries, such as banking and the financial sector, have to manage thousands of different types of documents regularly. Keeping up with this cumulative documentation can be difficult and costly. A digitized, paperless business means an increase of the office’s organization, work efficiency and more accurate results.

Pagefreezer partnered with the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) to create a report that examines how in-house legal teams are dealing with modern data sources. The report, called the Collecting Online Data for eDiscovery & Litigation Readiness Report, surveyed 211 in-house counsels across 23 industries and 22 countries.

Electronic communication has come a long way in a few short decades. In 2006, Rule 34 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure was amended to confirm that discovery of electronically stored information stood on equal footing with discovery of paper documents.

The events of 2020 highlighted two major challenges that modern in-house legal teams face. First, there has been an explosion of data sources across most organizations. From team collaboration platforms (Slack, MS Teams, etc.) and video conferencing tools (Zoom, Google Meet, Cisco Webex), to mobile text messages, company websites, and social media accounts, companies are faced with new kinds of ESI being generated in real-time throughout their organizations.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been law for three decades (it turned 30 in 2020), but it’s fair to say that the world has changed considerably since it was first enacted in 1990.

Optical character recognition (OCR) offers organizations the opportunity to get a much better digital handle on the information they store.

In a previous article, we discussed the importance of protecting your website content from intellectual property (IP) theft. By keeping a complete archive of your website—including all edits and deletions—it becomes much easier to prove that original content from your site has been stolen by another party.

Social media might seem like a lawless environment where cruel comments and reckless libel are simply the order of the day—but there have been instances where courts have classified social media posts and comments as defamation. This is true both in a country like the UK, where defamation is generally easier to prove, and the US, where the legal threshold is much higher.

Almost every day after a European football match, there’s another media headline highlighting a player who received racial abuse on social media. Football clubs condemn it. The content gets reported to social media platforms. Accounts are deleted. Authorities are notified and declare a ‘zero tolerance’ policy against discrimination and prejudiced behavior. Many players share the posts, highlighting the racism they continually face.