The following is the first post in a new blog series from Exterro CEO Bobby Balachandran, which will cover the challenges and solutions to issues that legal leaders care about.
What a difference 10 years makes! Who could have predicted in 2011
that organizations today would be facing such an unprecedented degree of
legal and regulatory scrutiny? Piled on top of that is the
ever-increasing danger from ingenious and unpredictable cyber security
risks.
This perfect storm of data risk has prompted businesses
to look more intensely at ways to address these challenges. As they do
so, they probably notice that there’s quite a bit of departmental
overlap in how they handle the growing burden of what might be
considered normal legal processes of compliance and investigation.
Gone
are the days when legal’s role in an organization was defined and
segregated. To complete the growing roster of duties related to
e-discovery, internal investigations, data subject access requests,
incident, and breach notifications, and more, legal must engage with
security, IT, compliance, privacy, and/or other departments that may
fall under their purview. If a business is regulated by a major data
privacy act like the GDPR, the complexities legal faces are
stratospherically greater.
Things may be quite different from
when I started Exterro, but one challenge in particular stands
consistently above the others: How do legal departments follow the
example of other business units and marry the role of technology in
legal and compliance processes in a coordinated and coherent way?
After
all, HR or finance departments usually have a suite of technology at
their fingertips to help them through every process from A to Z. Who
does that for legal? It’s a clear gap that Exterro has rapidly filled
over the last few years, because the market has demanded something
more cohesive than a set of point solutions—and I’m thrilled to say
that we are poised to own this category. Nobody else can offer what we
have because we started from the assumption that integration would
become more and more important as time went on.
The converging forces in e-discovery, data privacy, digital
forensics, and information governance have been the driving factors
behind Exterro’s recent investments in other companies and compatible,
adjacent technologies.
This is because all the legal
and regulatory challenges facing businesses today are related to: (1)
finding and collecting data and (2) ensuring its integrity. And to
effectively address these requires the ability to identify, preserve,
analyze, and present data in a contextual manner, quickly and
inexpensively. It also requires a consistent and defensible process.
Until
recently, there hasn’t been a software that solves all these
data-related challenges in a coherent and coordinated way across an
entire enterprise, especially when ensuring the integrity of the data
supply chain is of the utmost importance. Exterro has built the only software platform
that combines data management capabilities into a single, integrated
solution to give organizations a holistic framework for addressing their
Legal, Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) obligations—meaning that
we’re helping to turn the page on single-point solutions in the legal
space, following the same evolutionary software lifecycle seen in other
categories.
Our customers say it’s a welcome change, as
disparate departmental units simply can’t tackle the immense challenges
of major data-related legal and regulatory obligations by themselves—and
general counsel and chief legal officers (GC/CLO) are already under
pressure to simultaneously decrease costs and improve productivity,
efficiency, and end results. This can only be done by enabling a
coordinated effort across all the relevant departments.
The
demands on legal departments in the coming years will be absurdly
onerous. Delivering on the ability to identify, preserve, analyze, and
present data inexpensively within consistent, defensible processes
should be the primary goal of every legal GC/CLO in 2021, because it’s
the only way to stay compliant in the shifting regulatory landscape.
It’s also, without question, the best way to future-proof your
organization now for an environment that is growing into a crushing data
management burden.
In the coming weeks and months, I’ll cover
these challenges in greater depth in my blog series, along with how
Exterro is constantly evolving to help legal departments, GCs, and CLOs
solve these complex issues.
Until next time, take care legal leaders!