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Without a doubt, 2015 was a banner year for the legal technology world. From some of the biggest data breaches and e-discovery cases to what's coming in the New Year, Legaltech News provides you with a look forward and back on some of the biggest issues trending in the space.
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How Should E-Discovery Professionals Handle Data in 2016? As the year comes to a close, changes in the discovery process are occurring amid every facet of the legal profession. On Dec. 10, e-discovery software developer Exterro announced the release of its “2016 E-discovery Preparedness Almanac,” an offering aimed at helping e-discovery professionals navigate the ongoing changes in their field.
Top Predictions for Managed Services Models in 2016 Security, cost predictability, best in breed technology and around the clock support are the baseline benefits for any MSA. But how are firms bringing this to the next level?
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5 Data Breach Predictions for 2016 In its third annual Data Breach Industry Forecast, Experian makes five sobering predictions based on recent events and new and emerging trends.
The problem with many catastrophic risks isn’t just that their impacts, when they hit, are so massive. It’s also that their odds of occurring in any given short time frame are very small, so that planning for them has to be handled as a long-term priority while the proverbial sun is shining. And neither companies nor individuals are particularly apt at taking serious, long-term action to prepare for low probability, high consequence events.
Enter the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, which was created 30 years ago to help individuals, businesses, governments and global organizations to be better prepared for those longer range, more unpredictable dangers.
Knowledge@Wharton spoke with Howard Kunreuther and Robert Meyer, co-directors of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, and executive director Erwann Michel-Kerjan about the center’s research and how managing risk has changed over the past few decades.
An edited transcript of the conversation appears below.
Knowledge@Wharton: Howard, what led to the starting of the Risk Center 30 years ago?
Howard Kunreuther: Well, it’s interesting that our center has always focused on low probability, high consequence events, [because] it was a low probability, high consequence event that actually got the center started. I was in the office of the CEO of Rohm and Haas with my colleague Ned Bowman [of Wharton]. We were looking at the challenges that the company was facing in dealing with environmental risks, and when we arrived there, we were told that there had been a large chemical accident in Bhopal that the company was very concerned about. It involved Union Carbide, but every chemical company was involved. And that really was the start of the center, because we worked very closely with Rohm and Haas and Cigna to begin to look at issues like chemical accidents as a way of trying to figure out how we would deal with extreme events.
Knowledge@Wharton: Thinking about the catastrophic risks that businesses faced 30 years ago, what were some of the most important risks in addition to manufacturing accidents like Bhopal that you were concerned about?
Kunreuther: It was really the chemical accidents that got us started, and I think technological accidents were clearly a very important part of how businesses had to think. They weren’t thinking as much about it as we would have liked them to. They were saying it wasn’t going to happen to me. But that was certainly on the agenda, and any time there was an accident like a Bhopal, they then paid attention to it. The other area we focused on — and that had been the focus of a lot of the research a number of us had been doing, including my late colleague, Paul Kleindorfer, who was co-director of the center when we formed it — was natural hazard risks and natural disasters. And those were risks that were not predictable, but if there was a severe hurricane or flood or earthquake, that might have an impact in terms of how the firms had to react.
“When you talk to companies or individuals and ask what risks they are most concerned about, typically, they are the things that just happened yesterday. People tend to focus on the disaster that just happened.” –Robert Meyer
Knowledge@Wharton: What were some of the research projects that you took on to look into these risks?
Kunreuther: Well, because of our start with the chemical industry, we had a very large project with the Environmental Protection Agency on chemical accidents — how one dealt with them — and technological accidents, so we were certainly working on that. We were also working on the natural hazards area and why individuals were not protecting themselves and purchasing insurance. That was something that both Paul and I had been focusing on with others over a period of time.
The other area that emerged was the siting of the high-level radioactive waste facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. There was a whole project that was formed, and for 10 years, there was a group of us who were working together. It was very much an interdisciplinary group. Paul Slovic, president of Decision Research, was a part of that. Roger Kasperson, a geographer, a psychologist, and then there were anthropologists — we were all working with the state of Nevada to try to figure out how to site this facility, and so the center played a role in that. We had been looking at siting a liquefied natural gas facility before the center had been formed.
Knowledge@Wharton: What would you say were some of the key findings of your earliest research projects?
Kunreuther: The key findings are findings we may want to talk about even today. Really, what was happening was that it wasn’t until a disaster occurred that there was really a lot of attention paid. There was a tendency to say, “This is not going to happen to me,” and firms were behaving that way. Certainly, consumers and homeowners were behaving that way. As a result, we as a center were trying to figure out the important things to think about beforehand, and what kinds of programs and policies could be put forward to try to deal with them so we didn’t have to be in a reactive mode after a disaster occurred.
Knowledge@Wharton: If all of you were to look back over the past 30 years, how would you say the nature of risk has evolved and changed? Bob, would you like to start us off?
Robert Meyer: The risks have always been there. To build on what Howard was saying, one of the things we’ve observed as a center is that often, when you talk to companies or individuals and ask what risks they’re most concerned about, typically, they are the things that just happened yesterday. People tend to focus on the disaster that just happened, so one of the things we try to do as a center is get people and organizations to focus not only on the event that just happened, but also to refocus on unseen risks.
Just to give you an example, we work with the World Economic Forum, and every year, they come out with a survey of about 900 academics and ask them what are the risks that they are most concerned about. Typically, what you find is an awful lot of year-to-year variability in what is hitting the radar screen. For example, last year, the No. 1 thing that came up was state unrest, particularly in Europe. If you think about it, that makes sense, because one of the big news items in Europe last year was unrest in the Ukraine and so forth. But what’s interesting is a risk that was very important two or three years ago: cyberterrorism. In some sense, one of our challenges as a center is to get people and organizations to think about not just the thing that happened most recently, but to take a good long-term view of what are real risks. Often, the things you have to worry about are the things that you’re not currently thinking about.
Knowledge@Wharton: Erwann, what do you think?
Erwann Michel-Kerjan: …The
“Republished with permission from Knowledge@Wharton, the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.”
Gartner Researches’ Magic Quadrants are well known for categorizing innovations and defining the prevailing characteristics of tools and services in a specific marketplace. This year’s E-Discovery Software Magic Quadrant has identified the trends in the space, including predictions on the market size of the e-discovery software as well as an assessment of how the key players in the industry are preforming.
Those in the market for a new tool can use the report to quickly determine what vendors do best, and find the right fit for their practice. Twenty of the most popular e-discovery software suites were ranked for their ability to execute and for the completeness of their vision, dividing the group into four categories: challengers, leaders, visionaries and niche players of the e-discovery space.
Rankings:
Leaders: kCura Corp., FTI Consulting Inc.’s FTI Technology, Recommind Inc., ZyLAB, HP, Nuix Pty Ltd. and Exterro Inc.
Challengers: Epiq Systems Inc., Kroll Ontrack Inc., AccessData Group Inc. and Symantec Corp.
Visionaries: Guidance Software, IBM Corp., Catalyst Repository Systems and Microsoft Corp.
Niche Players: CommVault Systems Inc., Driven Inc., Ubic Inc., Xerox Corp. and LexisNexis
While 2014’s rankings were considered stagnant for including the same 20 names from 2013 (with only minor movement between categories, this year’s rankings showed the addition of several names as well as the exit of others including: KPMG, Stroz Friedberg and Integreon.
In addition to rating the 20 top performers within those quadrants, the research analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the group, providing a baseball card-like quick hit of what they do best and how. Legaltech News will dive deeper into that analysis with profiles and conversations with those vendors in the coming weeks.
Past identifying and categorizing leaders in the industry, Gartner’s research also took a holistic look at the industry. According to the research, the growth of the e-discovery marketplace continued unabated in 2014. Gartner estimated that total revenue for the enterprise e-discovery market was approximately $1.8 billion last year, and had a compound annual growth rate of 12 percent.
The growth is attributed to several trends, including a diversifying array of data streams that must be controlled within the context of discovery, as well as a continued desire to move e-discovery to more flexible, less expensive options.
One factor driving the evaluation and implementation of new e-discovery software is migration to Microsoft’s Office 365. According to the report, “Organizations are in the process of migrating email and documents into Office 365 and need to take a step back on what that means to their established e-discovery process and technology application.”
Another interesting trend identified in the research was the increasing proclivity of vendors to provide SaaS models of delivery. While the report warned that many of these are actually misidentified hosted solutions (which connect to a virtual environment via software installed locally rather than being accessible via Web as true SaaS platforms) it suggested that the method makes sense for those who have a variety of cloud-based information streams to consider in their discovery efforts.
According to the report,” This is a new area for e-discovery practitioners. The legal guidance and requirements on how to treat cloud data (social, website, Web email and Internet-of-thing content) within the e-discovery context is lacking. At the moment, organizations are dealing with the cloud data on an ad hoc basis.”
