Luminance, the leading artificial intelligence platform for the legal profession, has today announced that its pioneering machine learning platform will be adopted by Avianca S.A, the flagship Colombian airline and one of the biggest in Latin America, to optimise the company’s in-house document review processes.
CobbleStone Software, a leader in contract management and eProcurement software, is excited to announce simple, AI-Based contract record creation with VISDOM®, now available with the release of Contract Insight® version 17.5.0.
Contract creation has never been easier, thanks to Contract Insight’s drag and drop record initiation. Now available out-of-the-box, this new VISDOM-integrated feature allows users to easily import a variety of file types for record initiation (such as MS Word and PDF documents).
Once a file is dropped, Contract Insight users can select the contract type they want to create. Next, VISDOM’s data pre-processing engine uses built-in natural language processing (NLP) functionality to auto-extract and auto-fill pieces of key information in an easy-to-read set of tables.
Clauses detected within the document are also displayed, and users can compare clauses to those within their library. NLP is configurable, so Contract Insight administrators can arrange the tool to meet the needs of their organization.
Discover how simple contract creation can be with VISDOM’s AI-powered, drag and drop contract record initiation, complete with auto-extraction and backed by NLP!
“CobbleStone’s VISDOM AI-based drag and drop record initiation transforms and streamlines the way Contract Insight users create contracts, requests, purchase orders, bids, and much more. With this innovative feature, we continue to lead in the industry by providing CobbleStone users with better usability and governance over their entire source-to-contract platform.” – Bradford Jones, Director of Sales & Marketing at CobbleStone Software
Read “Artificial Intelligence 101: Introducing AI Into Contract Management” to discover improved contract oversight, proactive opportunity realization, and advanced understanding of contract risk. Download the AI-101 whitepaper today!
About CobbleStone Software
CobbleStone Software has been a leader in providing enterprise contract management, vendor management, and eSourcing software solutions for over 20 years and is trusted by thousands of users. CobbleStone’s contract management solutions provide contract and vendor tracking, configurable email alerts, calendar notifications, contract workflow management, robust security options, authoring of contract templates with dynamic clauses, revenue/cost management, full-text indexing and searching, vendor/client ratings, document version control, custom reports, electronic signature, smarter contracts with artificial intelligence and machine learning, and more.
To learn more about Contract Insight, contact the CobbleStone Team at sales@cobblestonesoftware.com or call 866-330-0056.
This press release was previously published.
Onna Extends Data Hosting Services to the United Kingdom
New York and Barcelona — 2 February, 2021: Onna, the world’s first Knowledge Integration Platform on a mission to make enterprise information accessible, useful, and private, has today launched a UK-hosted instance of its eDiscovery and Knowledge Integration Platform to service the needs of organizations operating in the United Kingdom.
This expansion provides Onna’s customers with the ability to host data within the Onna platform in line with UK data residency and data protection regulations such as GDPR. Customers who have operations in the UK will now be able to utilize Onna’s powerful connectivity and data management functions, safe in the knowledge that their data is being hosted in the same country.
For Onna, this is the first regional instance of the technology outside of North America and brings the Onna technology offering to a more international customer base. In addition, customers that have business operations in the UK will now be able to extend their relationship with Onna and use the technology to address challenges outside of their US locations.
The addition of the UK operation will be available from February 2021 and will be hosted in the Google Cloud Platform region in London, UK. It extends Onna’s capabilities globally by adding to the existing US-hosted operations.
Russ Grant, Vice President of Revenue, Onna, commented, “The UK instance of Onna brings our eDiscovery technology closer to customers in the UK, and allows us to meet their data residency requirements in line with the data protection and privacy rules in the region.” He added, “We are providing our customers with more choice. If they do not wish to have any data transferred to the US for processing or hosting, they now have the option to use the Onna UK instance. This will allow customers engaged in eDiscovery and data management projects on content hosted in the UK the ability to undertake this work without having to worry about the legal implications of transferring this data to the US.”
About Onna
Onna integrates knowledge from all workplace applications, allowing anyone to unify, protect, search, automate, and build on top of their organization’s proprietary knowledge. With the rise of cloud-based and hosted workplace apps, knowledge is extremely fragmented and difficult to access in most organizations, costing businesses huge amounts of time and money in searching for their own information. Onna’s Machine Learning-based Knowledge Integration Platform can be connected to any cloud or on-premise application, including GSuite, Office 365, Slack, Dropbox, Salesforce, and many more. It supports eDiscovery, information governance, knowledge management, archiving, monitoring for private and sensitive data sharing, and building bespoke internal workflow apps using proprietary information.
With headquarters in New York City and Barcelona and teams in Raleigh, San Francisco, Toulouse, and London, Onna supports some of the world’s leading companies, including Dropbox, Electronic Arts, Facebook, Fitbit, Lyft, NewsCorp, and Slack. Onna has raised $43M from investors, including Atomico, Dawn Capital, Dropbox, and Slack Fund. To learn more, visit www.onna.com.
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Hanzo Hold Revolutionizes Discovery for Google Workspace (G Suite) with New Release
Hanzo gives enterprises incomparable ease-of-use, visibility, and granular control over the collection, preservation, culling, tagging, and exporting of Google Workspace data in a review-ready format for discovery.
Hanzo, a company known for its pioneering technology in dynamic web content preservation from enterprise collaboration applications and complex websites, today announced the beta release of Hanzo Hold for Google Workspace (G Suite) with select customers, with general availability in April. Hanzo brings best-in-class discovery insights and delivers a purpose-built ediscovery and investigation tool that solves key unresolved challenges with existing market solutions.
Most organizations have an overwhelming volume of data in Google Workspace. Hanzo Hold makes it easy to manage data discovery and investigations efficiently and cost-effectively with these features.
- Easy-to-use interface controls both Google Workspace and Slack: One interface controlling collaborative tools, data preservation and data collection.
- Google Vault control: Easily connect to Google Workspace with a better user experience for Google Vault allowing Legal Ops to issue holds and perform collections through Hanzo Hold.
- Targeted data collections: Reduce overall collection sizes by precisely defining custodians (users) and their data by using visual tools such as Google Drive Explorer along with date filters. Users can select the exact Drive information they need to collect from any custodian down to the individual file level.
- Enhanced file metadata: Hanzo provides visibility to extended metadata beyond what is available via Google Vault, thereby providing better search capabilities once a file is collected.
- Full data indexing and search capabilities: File searching comes to life in Hanzo with full text and metadata available creating more precise search returns. Provides greater search depth than Google Search/Vault alone giving users more accurate and complete search results.
- View file versions and history: View file history and previous versions to access more file information. Provides more accuracy and better granular control over document versioning and user edit history.
- File tagging: Organize data and have more control over data within the system and greater accuracy when exporting information.
- Review ready exports: Exports complete with full metadata, native files, and text virtually eliminate the need to index data inside review platforms such as Relativity saving complexity, time, and money.
“Hanzo Hold for Google Workspace is born from customers requesting easy-to-use solutions for managing discovery for both Google Workspace and Slack collaboration data,” said Senior Product Manager, Dave Ruel. “ Through Hanzo Hold, we’re providing enterprises one interface to control the data preservation and collection of these collaborative platforms and we’re providing customers solutions to simplify the unique challenges of dynamic, complex data sources — saving time, training costs, and the need for multiple systems.”
About Hanzo
Hanzo brings context and a greater understanding of enterprise data to corporate legal and compliance teams by providing in-house control over dynamic and collaborative data sources. This control allows organizations to reduce billions of dollars in risk, litigation, and compliance costs and elevate their corporate legal and regulatory compliance responses. Hanzo’s software empowers defensible preservation, targeted collection, and efficient review of dynamic content from enterprise collaboration applications and complex websites. Hanzo is SOC 2® Type 2 certified, demonstrating its commitment to data security and serves large corporations worldwide. Learn more at hanzo.co and follow updates on Twitter: @gethanzo or on LinkedIn.
Rapid Product and Service Adoption, Aggressive International Growth Establishes DISCO as Trusted Innovation Partner
Industry-Leading Net Promoter Score (NPS) Speaks to Best-in-Class Products and Services
AUSTIN — Feb. 2, 2021 — As legal organizations pivoted to manage the complexities of remote work, they turned to legal technology leader DISCO as a trusted partner to navigate cloud adoption and embrace advanced legal technology. The company today announced widespread adoption of enhanced ediscovery data management capabilities, industry-leading Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and a 300% increase in international business — all positioning the company for aggressive growth in 2021 and beyond.
The Data Management Suite within DISCO Ediscovery, which allows users to ingest, process, and remediate documents in a single platform, has been used by more than two thirds of DISCO’s ediscovery customers to upload and transfer their own data. When legal teams transitioned to working from home, DISCO optimized its solution to deliver unprecedented speed and convenience, even in home office setups: the average data upload is 33 Mbps, or 2.75 terabytes per matter per day — the equivalent of 170 million pages of documents that could fill 67,584 Bankers Boxes.
Today, DISCO is hosting more than 10 billion files, and DISCO’s autoscaling infrastructure using AWS Lambda provisioned 13 billion server calls in the fourth quarter alone.
DISCO Products and Services Far Exceed Customer Expectations
DISCO uses Net Promoter Score (NPS) to determine customer satisfaction for its products and services. A company’s NPS is generated by asking customers, “How likely is it that you would recommend [company/product/service] to a friend or colleague?”.
Fifty-four percent of NPS respondents gave DISCO Ediscovery a 10 out of 10, for an overall NPS of 67. DISCO’s professional services organization earned an NPS of 88, with 83% of respondents ranking DISCO a 10 out of 10. By way of comparison, Retently reports that enterprise software companies average an NPS of 44, and SaaS companies come in at 30. According to Customer Guru, DISCO’s NPS is higher than all but three of 100 top brands. For example, the NPS for Apple is 47, Amazon is 25 and Netflix is 13 — all beloved and iconic companies with amazing products.
“DISCO has always focused on building ‘Products Legal Loves.’ Our stellar NPS results, customer growth and expansion, and product and service innovation make it clear that we are achieving this cornerstone goal,” said DISCO CEO Kiwi Camara. “Legal organizations are increasingly turning to DISCO to help them navigate the digital transformation that today’s work environment demands. We remain focused on the development of a multi-product, full-stack solution that empowers the legal function: ‘Technology That Powers Legal.’”
Technology Innovation, Experience With Global Matters Fueled 3x International Expansion
Legal teams around the world are embracing DISCO for ediscovery and edisclosure, case management, and managed review. In 2020, DISCO’s European Union client base doubled and EU revenue tripled, with customers including Clyde & Co, Kennedys and Withersworldwide aggressively expanding their business with DISCO; the company has been hiring extensively to support and accelerate this demand. Global law firms are also increasingly engaging DISCO on international matters, as the company delivers products and services to address the legal needs of organizations across EMEA, Asia-Pacific and South America.
In addition to the speed, ease of use and associated cost savings that come with DISCO products, EU law firms also praise DISCO’s native high-speed uploader, which provides a 14x improvement over traditional file transfer methods and 10% improvement over leading file transfer acceleration technologies. This unique, cutting-edge technology — available exclusively from DISCO at no additional cost — has proven exceptionally beneficial during the pandemic when traditional data collection and transfer methods are not possible.
“Working with DISCO over the past several years, we have found more than an ediscovery provider – DISCO is a true strategic partner that helps us utilize technology to find our key evidence faster so we can better serve our clients,” said Michael Silvain, Ediscovery Manager for Kennedys. “They empower our global teams to work faster, smarter, and to take advantage of advanced solutions and artificial intelligence to ensure even the obstacles of worldwide lockdowns and remote work are overcome. Beyond their exceptional products, DISCO’s professional services team have supported our success across every matter, and that value is extended to our clients to help them win.”
About DISCO
DISCO is a legal technology company that applies artificial intelligence and cloud computing to legal problems to help lawyers and legal teams improve legal outcomes for their clients. Corporate legal departments, law firms, and government agencies around the world use DISCO for ediscovery, case management, compliance, disputes, and investigations. For more information, visit www.csdisco.com.
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.