Written by Doug Austin, Editor of eDiscovery Today
E-Discovery Day may have been last week, but I’m not done talking about it yet!
Last week, IPRO, in partnership with ACEDS, presented the webinar E-Discovery Day 2021: A Look at Industry Resiliency and Preparations for Reinventing the Future, and it was a delightful combination of insights, prognostications and audience polls that made for an entertaining and enlightening webinar!
Here are a few highlights.
IPRO executives Ryan Joyce, VP of Strategy, and Nick Inglis, Director of Information Governance, conducted the session and, as I mentioned, it contained several audience polls. Some were about the experiences of the webinar attendees and others were trivia questions to gauge people’s knowledge eDiscovery and Information Governance.
Information Governance Trivia Questions
To have a little fun, let’s start with the trivia questions! Here they are, see how many you know! Answers at the bottom.
- In what year did then-Gartner’s Debra Logan define Information Governance? Choices are: 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015.
- In what year did the first conference exclusively about Information Governance occur? Choices are: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019.
- In what year was a circle called “Information Governance” added to the EDRM? Choices are: 2005, 2010, 2014, 2017.
Past, Present and Future of eDiscovery and Information Governance
As for the presentation/discussion itself, Ryan and Nick (who wins for best holiday background I’ve seen so far in a webinar this year) discussed the past (what got us here), the present (the last couple of years and leading into Legalweek 2022) and the future (5+ years out and preparing for that future, at least for some). From an eDiscovery standpoint, the past included things like manual Bates stampers, manual blackout redactions with a Sharpie, CDs and DVDs and lugging boxes around.
See how good you have it today?
As for Information Governance, it started at a system-specific level (such as the SharePoint Governance toolkit that Nick prepared years ago for the Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM).
It’s worth noting that a lot of people have learned about Information Governance through their association with eDiscovery, but many more people today (including Nick) have learned about eDiscovery through their association with Information Governance. That’s how much Information Governance has advanced as an important initiative in recent years!
Discussing the present in eDiscovery and the last couple of years includes trends such as a huge increase in virtual meetings, the move of eDiscovery (along with everything else) to the cloud, AI, and active learning technologies, self-service eDiscovery and single line-item pricing. For information governance, some trends include the rise of importance of IG itself, the convergence of IG with eDiscovery and legal and “certification wars”, where AIIM, ARMA International, and InfoGov World all have certification programs for Information Governance.
And leading into Legalweek 2022, the focus is on topics like AI, legal hold (which relates to both eDiscovery and IG), case and project management dashboards, data privacy, and “reducing attack surface” by protecting PII and reducing ROT o minimize cyber risk.
As for the future? The future is now. As Ryan discussed, we’re already seeing a shift in the traditional EDRM model from finding insights in the data AFTER legal hold, collection, processing and hosting to BEFORE any of those activities, leading to smart collection and hold of a lot less data moving downstream in the process. A lot of people simply haven’t adjusted to address that shift yet, but it’s here today.
Conclusion
The webinar was informative, fun and entertaining, and included several additional audience polls that you can check out to see what experiences the audience has had and what they’re looking forward to in the future, including (hopefully) a return to in-person events! You can check out the webinar on-demand here!
As for the trivia questions, here are the answers:
- In what year did then-Gartner’s Debra Logan define Information Governance? 2010. Here’s the blog post where she discussed it.
- In what year did the first conference exclusively about Information Governance occur? 2014. According to Nick, there were 200 people at the first conference, including him!
- In what year was a circle called “Information Governance” added to the EDRM? 2014. I was at the annual meeting when EDRM decided to change Information Management to Information Governance and make it a circle!
If you got them all right, you really know your Information Governance trivia! Congrats!
And for more educational topics from me related to eDiscovery, cybersecurity and data privacy, feel free to follow my blog, eDiscovery Today!
