SPONSORED SECTION
Everything You Own in a Box to the Left By Samantha Green
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he flow of an Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) begins with the information governance box — getting your house in order by efficiently and effectively managing information before litigation begins. But what if we added a new box to this e-discovery framework… all the way to the left? This “box” would be labeled Risk Assessment, a crucial first step companies would take to dig through their data to uncover issues before they arise. By analyzing electronic corporate communications, negative patterns concerning employee
behavior — among a plethora of other workplace matters — can be detected before they escalate. But the question then becomes, do companies really want to know, and what is their responsibility to act once they do know? Proactively assessing and building legal risk metrics throughout the ordinary course of business provides added value for corporations of all types. It gives leadership better insight into the workplace culture so that harmful behavioral patterns can be exposed and bad conduct can be stopped before it becomes a serious legal problem. Rather than waiting for a whistle-
blower to speak up or an employee to file a complaint, by gathering and evaluating electronic intelligence to predict issues, companies can forecast legal spend well before litigation or investigations come down the pike. They can determine when policies and protocols aren’t working as intended and then revamp company communications to ensure compliance. Although the benefits of risk assessment are significant, many companies don’t want to create their own Pandora’s Box scenario by opening themselves up to issues that perhaps they don’t need to know about. They’re hesitant to unnecessarily disrupt their workplace, shake up leadership structure, hinder corporate goals or impact their profitability. When weighing whether they should leave well enough alone or seek out underlying problems, these common questions may begin to arise: Does this type of analysis expose them to litigation that never would have happened — costing time, money, and manpower? What if patterns of sexual harassment are uncovered, but no one has actually brought a claim? Once you know about negative behavior, even if an employee hasn’t explicitly brought it to your attention, how can you pretend it’s not really happening? By identifying heightened risk, you may now have an obligation to do something about it before it becomes a real legal liability. And many companies simply don’t want to put themselves in that position. However, as technology advances and risk assessments become more mainstream and affordable, it will likely become standard practice to rely on risk metrics derived from electronically stored information (ESI). Due to the abundance of unstructured data swirling around within company databases, e-discovery methods are becoming more sophisticated and changing how companies find key information to mitigate risk, going far beyond keyword searches of the past. Artificial Intelligence (AI), also known as cognitive computing, uses machine learning to quickly find patterns, core concepts and similarities that may otherwise have
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