Postmates Delivers Intuitive, Review-Ready Slack Data Exports With the Help of Hanzo Hold

Postmates—a rapidly growing delivery service—considers Slack to be a critical business communications tool. As its importance has grown, the IT team was concerned by how long it might take to search for and export data for internal investigations and ediscovery matters.

“ Slack information governance is a big blind spot for a lot of companies. Anyone who’s looking to fill that gap and make sense of the data they’re generating within Slack with an easy-to-use product that’s backed by a responsive supporting partner couldn’t do better than Hanzo.”

Sean Joerg, Head of IT for Postmates

Read how Postmates legal, HR, and IT teams use Hanzo Hold to quickly search for, preserve, and collect Slack data in its native format with full context available.

For many small- and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), hiring a full-time head of marketing or Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is unappealing and simply out of reach.

Many SMBs experiment with hiring a junior level marketing staffer, only to be disappointed by their limited expertise, industry contacts, and pool of resources. These staffers rarely have the experience or vision to provide strategy and results.

Enter the fractional CMO.

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OBJECTIVE

BuzzFeed uses the collaboration platform Slack to augment email and its other modes of internal communication. As a result, its legal and IT teams wanted to ensure they were prepared to identify, review, and produce Slack data in response to ediscovery matters and investigations. BuzzFeed needed a tool that could efficiently locate, preserve, and export that data in a review-ready format.

KEY ISSUES

• Quickly and easily search through Slack users and channels to identify relevant information
• Seamlessly export that information in a reviewable format
• Confidently state that all relevant data had been identified and considered—demonstrating defensible processes

APPROACH

Thanks to Hanzo Hold, BuzzFeed’s legal and IT teams have a tool that they can use to locate all relevant information within their organization’s Slack application in response to any ediscovery or investigation request. Moreover, they can produce that data to outside counsel for further review.

Read the case study to see how BuzzFeed attains greater efficiency and confidence using Hanzo Hold to manage its Slack data for ediscovery.

Onna Blog: Unified Information Governance: Reconciling Conflicts Between Stakeholders

Information governance is a critical discipline that encompasses many parts of the business. Compliance, security, legal, and IT all have an important stake in managing information; however, when it comes to handling that information, conflict can arise. Priorities may differ when it comes to data retention, archival, and deletion, leading to difficult decision-making. Add in the pressures of data privacy laws, like GDPR and CCPA, and the perils of disunity only intensify.

So what does the decision-making process look like when legal wants to retain data but IT wants to delete it — both with valid reasons? How can organizations avoid spending on outside counsel to weigh-in on internal decisions? If these questions resonate with you, it might be time to take a hard look at what information governance means in your organization. More likely than not, you are taking a siloed approach to information management that has your people working against, rather than with, one another.

Here are six ways to align information stakeholders and proactively avert conflict.

1. Formalize stakeholder relationships

All too often, information stakeholders are thrust into meeting for the first time because of urgent matters, such as litigation or discovery requests. These matters require cross-functional collaboration, and yet crucial relationships may not be defined. To ensure all stakeholders are connected, you may want to start an information governance steering committee comprising key members from security, compliance, privacy, legal, IT, and other lines of business that hold essential company information — like HR or finance. By proactively bringing stakeholders together and formalizing their roles and responsibilities, you can foster clear communication and coordination from the get-go.

2. Understand information’s value from all perspectives

Company information is multifaceted. It lives in different places and serves different purposes, so its lifecycle isn’t clear-cut — nor is its treatment. For example, while personally identifiable information (PII) may need to be held for regulatory compliance reasons, you might want your year-over-year company performance metrics for business strategy purposes. To avoid miscommunication and conflict, your information governance framework needs to address the value of information from all angles. To start, you can ask questions like: What purpose does this data serve? What department(s) are concerned with this data and why? How might this data pose risk, maximize value, or both? The sooner teams address information from a holistic view, rather than a siloed view, the better.

3. Make a plan for potential conflicts with risk front-of-mind

Once you map out the answers to these questions, you can start to spot overlap and conflict in priorities. Although every organization is different, the most common conflict arises around the question of retention — whether to keep or delete. Although you might be legally bound to retain information, you might also be required to delete information for privacy matters. In scenarios like this, it’s crucial that the necessary stakeholders come together to resolve issues, and not just the ones in conflict. Depending on the situation, you may need the input of separate stakeholders, such as IT, to help you understand what technical solutions are possible. Regardless of the nature of your potential conflicts, identifying them early on will help you get ahead of pain, risk, and confusion.

4. Develop an information governance policy

After you outline stakeholder relationships and identify potential conflicts, you’ll want to bake those solutions into your information governance policy. There’s a lot to consider in developing a policy, but a good rule of thumb is to focus on people, process, and technology. You’ll also want to break it into two portions: minimizing risk and maximizing value.

On the minimizing risk front, narrowing down legal, compliance, and privacy obligations first will ensure the most critical protocols are covered. This could include anything from the who/when/how of handling yearly audits to creating a data retention policy. Once that’s done, you can move on to the data maximization portion, which informs how you will protect and utilize your information. This could be anything from handling eDiscovery to data loss prevention measures. Every company’s policy may look different, but the one thing that should remain consistent is alignment from all information stakeholders.

5. Assign roles and responsibilities

Once you develop an information governance policy, you’ll want to make sure every stakeholder understands their roles and responsibilities. This ensures your framework is put into practice effectively. Every organization looks different, but a good way to delegate responsibilities among each department is branching down from the executive level to working groups. Executives, such as the CIO, CSO, General Counsel, and others can operate as key decision-makers, and different departments, such as security, IT, and compliance, can form working groups to encourage better data stewardship over their own information.

6. Unify your information in one place

You can have all the right people and policies in place, but without the right technology, it can still be a challenge to locate your most vital information — which can lead to stakeholder conflict. Especially when it comes to the scattered, proliferating nature of cloud applications, keeping tabs on dynamic data such as messages, threads, and attachments in so many locations can be daunting. More often than not, teams end up heavily relying on IT to expend more time and resources. Implementing a solution that brings all of your siloed data in one private, secure, and searchable place can make it easier for stakeholders to find what they need at a moment’s notice. Not only can this help you avert future conflict, but also reduce risk, maximize value, and enhance compliance.

Organizations have a huge opportunity to leverage key information to help realize their goals — but first, their governance framework must guide key stakeholders towards alignment. By focusing on the factors we’ve discussed, you can start to transform your information governance plan to work for your people, not against them.

It is safe to say that 2020 was a challenging and unprecedented year across all industries, not least the legal sector. Yet our altered ways of working have spawned new innovations and different ways of thinking about “business as usual.” For the legal sector, AI has become a key part of many lawyers’ arsenal, allowing them to rapidly respond to new challenges such as remote working, increased market and economic volatility and complex client demands. As we approach 2021, it is clear that this momentum in the legal sector to embrace all things tech shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.

‘Technophobia’ is no longer a viable excuse for lawyers

The pandemic has accelerated the pace of technology adoption generally, and has also opened lawyers’ eyes to the possibilities that advanced technology such as AI can herald. Technology has moved from being a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must have’, allowing businesses and lawyers to keep pace with marketplace changes whilst also driving profitability and growth.

Let’s take the example of M&A due diligence- whilst years ago, the number of contracts to review for a transaction was a lengthy yet reasonable task, an explosion in enterprise data has rendered this process practically unfeasible. Indeed, hiring armies of junior lawyers to manually trawl through endless volumes of contracts in order to find a crucial ‘Change of Control’ clause is increasingly becoming recognised as a waste of resources and an inefficient use of legal talent.

And this is where AI comes in: Luminance is able to rapidly read and form an understanding of legal data, instantly surfacing crucial clauses, datapoints and anomalies at the click of a button. Not only does this instil lawyers with the greatest confidence that nothing has been missed in their review, but by enabling them to cut through the admin-heavy, mundane work, advisors are once again able to focus on adding value where it matters: the analysis. As Gavin Williams, Partner at Holland & Knight said to me at a recent Luminance webinar, “Luminance allows young lawyers to push skills faster, resulting in better quality and better work product which is closer to being ‘client ready’ than ever before.”

Another example is the sudden switch to remote working in 2020. With many offices now remote working for the foreseeable future and some organisations reimagining how offices will function after that, it seems that increased remote working or flexi-working is here to stay. Luminance’s easy cloud-deployment and advanced collaboration tools such as the ability to allocate tasks and track work progression are invaluable for the seamless coordination of legal teams. We have had customers such as VdA, Norburg & Scherp and The 36 Group use the tool to coordinate teams in connection with large review projects.

Clearly, the real, practical value of AI can no longer be overlooked and as we enter 2021, it is clear that AI is integral to the infrastructure of all organisations.

Clients expect more- tech is part of the answer

Client demands and expectations have always been high on the agenda for law firms yet increased economic volatility and steepening competition will once again push these demands into the spotlight in 2021. Indeed, recent research by Luminance found that decreased client budgets are the biggest concern for senior lawyers. Clients are increasingly savvy as to the technology that is available to lawyers as well as the benefits in terms of efficiency, insight and cost.

This year, for example, the Dubai office of Dentons were tasked with a time-sensitive review of 200 documents. This number quickly swelled to over 180,000 documents, all of which had to be reviewed in just two weeks. After consulting with their client, Dentons opted to deploy Luminance and were able to review the entire dataset within the timeline set by the client and with huge cost-savings. Results like this show that by embracing technology, lawyers are able to not just meet but exceed the expectations of their clients and this is something that we predict will continue far into 2021.

The year that in-house teams embrace technology

The last few years have seen a growth in the role and scope of in-house legal professionals. Indeed, in-house lawyers are not just subject matter specialists that are only to be consulted on specific legal matters but are instead now expected to play a significant and proactive role in wider legal matters, including ensuring compliance, examining potential business risk and being key members of the corporate decision-making team.

Consistent with this trend, this year there has been a 65% increase in the uptake of our technology by in-house teams in order to streamline work such as the review of outside counsel guidelines, employment contracts and regulatory compliance reviews in the face of data protection regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA. We expect to see a continued acceleration in this trend in 2021, with these lawyers becoming more tech-savvy, efficient and sophisticated in the projects they manage in-house in order to better control costs during uncertain economic times. Recently, we welcomed Featurespace, a market-leader in enterprise financial crime prevention software, as a customer in order to help the company’s in-house legal team to gain more control over their in-house processes.

2021: The year that AI got real in the legal industry?

This year has marked a turning point for the legal industry’s adoption of AI technology. At Luminance, we have seen an astonishing 40% increase in the uptake of our technology since the beginning of the year, with Luminance’s customer base now reaching nearly 300 firms and organisations. In 2021, AI will be a fundamental component of every law firm and business and to that end, the future of the industry.