Staff Update – We heard from ILTA CEO Joy Heath Rush. She was very pleased with the conference results and shared some great feedback she had received from attendees. According to Joy, those attending onsite seemed to have been very happy with the quality of the content of the sessions. It sounds like the Business Partners were thrilled with many high quality conversations at the event too. Overall, the general consensus was that the return of ILTACON ‘live’ felt much like a family reunion, and people were thrilled to be back!
The Legal Engineer Consultant – I was looking forward to this one, especially since I am trying to find some Data Science types for one of my own clients. But when I attempted to log in, I was not able to view the program. I believe it was for onsite viewers only, but will follow up to see if the video is available in the event archives next week.
Better Together: eDiscovery with Teams and Other Collaboration Platforms – This was a great session, very relevant in today’s remote work environment. The use of various collab technologies has risen drastically since the beginning of 2020, and collecting ESI from these tools can be quite tricky. During a quick poll, the audience was surveyed to find their most used collaboration tools. Teams and Zoom were by far the most used, with 38% and 31% respectively. Next were Slack (8%) and WhatsApp (4%) with a variety of other tools being named, many of which are only used in certain parts of the world.
Some collaboration tools do not save a history of files at all, while some (think a shared drive with a document edited by several individuals) may save hundreds of versions. There is also the issue of “bifurcated conversations” that may start out on one platform such as email, and then move Teams chat, and then perhaps to text messages. Finding and collecting the data from various applications can be quite challenging. The biggest eDiscovery challenges with respect to these tools referenced by the speakers include data privacy & security, collections challenges, and finding a way to review and ultimately produce the ESI pulled from multiple collaboration tools.