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Law Firm Technology Survey 2011 – The American Lawyer

November 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

It’s been some time since the economy wasn’t the dominant theme in our yearly survey. But while the struggling recovery must still be reckoned with, feedback from the 82 law firm technology chiefs who responded this year—and follow-up interviews with nearly a dozen of them—reveal that the top focus has moved from dollars to data. The key issue: How do firms make information accessible to their lawyers without making it too accessible. The main challenges facing chief information officers include how to capture the potential cost savings offered by cloud-based data-storage options without compromising security, deciding which applications lawyers can download to their firm-supported mobile devices, and responding to client concerns about where and how data is kept and accessed. Striking the right balance will help determine how firms fare in an anytime-anywhere world.

Drawing The Line

How much data access is too much? Security concerns take center stage in The American Lawyer’s annual survey of law firm technology.

More @ Law Firm Technology Survey 2011 – The American Lawyer.

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eDiscovery Disasters: What Every CIO Needs to Know – IT Management

October 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

With the rising tide of regulation and litigation, it can be a challenge for CIOs to know what data the company needs to retain — and for how long — in order to protect and defend itself in the event of a legal or regulatory incident. According Symantec’s 2011 Information Retention and eDiscovery Survey, conducted by Applied Research, it’s no longer just a question of archiving your email. During the eDiscovery process, attorneys more commonly seek structured and unstructured information than they do email, the survey found. Social media and text messages also made the list of commonly requested digital records. Annie Goranson, discovery attorney at Symantec, says that knowing what to keep is critical for CIOs. “There are a lot of risks associated with keeping that data around past its useful life. It really becomes a drain on the business and on the technology that the business is using. The ability and the focus to develop a deletion policy [and] a retention policy puts the entire organization in a much better position with respect to risk. From the CIO’s perspective, that’s probably the biggest gain.” Applied Research surveyed 2,000 global enterprises with at least 1,000 employees on behalf of Symantec in June and July 2011. Respondents came from both IT management and legal departments. In addition to highlighting survey findings, we provide six steps to help you keep your organization prepared for an information request.

slideshow @  eDiscovery Disasters: What Every CIO Needs to Know – IT Management.

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Executives May Be Too Confident on Cybersecurity, Survey Finds – NYTimes.com

September 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Every week comes a new report warning how vulnerable consumers, companies and government agencies are to hackers bent on breaching computer systems and extracting sensitive data.

This week came a somewhat unusual report, compiled by the global consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. It surveyed more than 9,000 executives in over 130 countries and found them confident in their ability to secure their information systems and bullish about cybersecurity spending. In the survey, released Thursday, 43 percent of respondents said they had confidence in their security protocols and 50 percent said they expected their companies to spend increasing amounts of money on cybersecurity.

Digital hubris can be dangerous, though.

PricewaterhouseCoopers parsed the data more closely. They asked the executives about the precautions they were taking. It turned out that only 13 percent of those surveyed had actually done what the consulting firm considered to be adequate — meaning they had an overall security strategy, they had reviewed the effectiveness of their strategy and they knew precisely the types of breaches that had already hit them over the last 12 months.

Even as the use of social networks has proliferated, barely one in three respondents said their companies had a policy governing their employees’ use of tools like Facebook and LinkedIn. Social media, the report’s authors concluded, is a double-edged sword for many companies.

via Executives May Be Too Confident on Cybersecurity, Survey Finds – NYTimes.com.

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Executives May Be Too Confident on Cybersecurity, Survey Finds – NYTimes.com

September 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Every week comes a new report warning how vulnerable consumers, companies and government agencies are to hackers bent on breaching computer systems and extracting sensitive data.

This week came a somewhat unusual report, compiled by the global consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. It surveyed more than 9,000 executives in over 130 countries and found them confident in their ability to secure their information systems and bullish about cybersecurity spending. In the survey, released Thursday, 43 percent of respondents said they had confidence in their security protocols and 50 percent said they expected their companies to spend increasing amounts of money on cybersecurity.

Digital hubris can be dangerous, though.

PricewaterhouseCoopers parsed the data more closely. They asked the executives about the precautions they were taking. It turned out that only 13 percent of those surveyed had actually done what the consulting firm considered to be adequate — meaning they had an overall security strategy, they had reviewed the effectiveness of their strategy and they knew precisely the types of breaches that had already hit them over the last 12 months.

Even as the use of social networks has proliferated, barely one in three respondents said their companies had a policy governing their employees’ use of tools like Facebook and LinkedIn. Social media, the report’s authors concluded, is a double-edged sword for many companies.

via Executives May Be Too Confident on Cybersecurity, Survey Finds – NYTimes.com.

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Survey: Tablet Buyers Only Have Eyes for the iPad | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

August 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Current tablet owners and prospective buyers alike overwhelmingly have their eyes on just one company’s device for future purchases—Apple’s iPad. Some 93 percent of consumers who already own a tablet own an iPad, according to a new survey from Baird Research & Insights, while more than 94 percent of potential purchasers are considering buying an Apple tablet.

Coming in a distant second was Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad with webOS, named by 10.4 percent of respondents as a tablet they would consider buying, according to the Baird survey (table below). Given that respondents were allowed to give multiple responses in naming a tablet they’d consider buying, HP probably shouldn’t get too complacent about its second-place finish.

And given that Best Buy has reportedly sold only 25,000 of the 270,000 TouchPads that HP has supplied the retailer with—this despite HP slashing its asking price for 16GB and 32GB TouchPads by $100 recently—all of the other tablet makers who finished even further behind Apple probably ought to be really worried.

via Survey: Tablet Buyers Only Have Eyes for the iPad | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.

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E-Discovery Needs To Move To The Cloud, Survey Finds – Network Computing

July 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Respondents to a recent unscientific survey on e-discovery indicated that they were particularly interested in adding e-discovery support for cloud applications and social media in their organizations, but that they did not think their organizations were prepared to perform e-discovery in the cloud. In addition, they seemed more interested in monitoring potential legal challenges from social media than they did in controlling their employees’ use of social media in the first place. The survey was performed by Clearwell Systems (which was recently purchased by Symantec) in conjunction with the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) analyst firm.

Only 25% of respondents considered themselves prepared to handle e-discovery requests inside the cloud, with 30% indicating that they reported cloud applications “in scope” for e-discovery in 2010 and 60% anticipating the discovery of cloud-based applications in 2011. Thirty-seven percent have no defined policy, while 18% have no agreement with their cloud provider. This is a problem because, when user organizations first set up agreements with cloud providers, they are more interested in putting the information into the cloud and don’t think so much about how to retrieve it, says Katey Wood, an analyst in information management for ESG. Similarly, cloud vendors encourage users to put more data in the cloud but don’t have an incentive to give the data back, with the result that user organizations don’t have custody and control of the data but are still considered responsible for it, she says. The data can be difficult to work with, Wood adds, noting that one can download a Gmail mailbox but conversational threads are not maintained.

Similarly, while 27% of respondents considered social media in scope for e-discovery in 2010, 58% said they considered it in scope for 2011, with 79% showing interest in Facebook, 64% showing interest in Twitter and 55% showing interest in LinkedIn. This result surprised Wood because, she says, not all companies are using social media and because some companies didn’t appear to have any sort of policy around it.

via E-Discovery Needs To Move To The Cloud, Survey Finds – Network Computing.

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Litigation Management Survey Identifies Trend Toward Bolder Investments in People and Technology in Law Firms – MarketWatch

June 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Findings from a nationwide survey of law firms and corporate legal departments suggest that, while both corporate legal departments and their outside counsel are using various tools to achieve greater litigation efficiency, a trend may be developing in which law firms are making significant investments in people and innovative technologies so they are able to better manage the entire litigation process. The survey was conducted online among 513 lawyers by Harris Interactive(R) on behalf of LexisNexis(R) ( www.lexisnexis.com ).

The information is part of a set of findings from the State of Litigation Management report released today by LexisNexis. The report, which is available for free download at ( www.lexisnexis.com/litigation-survey2011 ), also reveals attitudes among U.S. lawyers regarding current litigation management practices and suggests opportunities for ways to achieve greater efficiencies.

via Litigation Management Survey Identifies Trend Toward Bolder Investments in People and Technology in Law Firms – MarketWatch.

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E-Discovery: A Growing Trend For Increasing Efficiencies Using IT

April 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Commissioned by IE Discovery Inc., the 2010 Benchmarking Study of Electronic Discovery Practices for Government Agencies Survey revealed that while budget constraints are rising for agencies, 61 percent of government employees claim to be “more confident” in their ability to manage e-discovery. Forty-six government attorneys, paralegals and information technology personnel from 24 government agencies took part in the survey.

Conducted annually, the survey also revealed a reduced reliance on paper, more work being done in-house and an overall higher volume of data to manage.

Other points uncovered in the study include:

Government agencies have no standard approach to impose and manage litigation holds.

Almost one-half of agencies are now collecting “structured data” in repositories, databases and similar systems.

The form of production varies greatly. Almost 40 percent of respondents reported producing discovery requests in image and text formats, 37 percent in native file formats and only 41 percent on paper.

Bill Detamore, IE Discovery’s chief legal officer, said that government agencies should look at improving their early data assessment strategies, which in the long run, could save money by reducing the sheer size of data sets they handle.

“Gaining competence in this area may be one way for government discovery professionals to better leverage their limited resources and fulfill the expectation to do more with less,” he said in a statement.

via CIOZone.com – Professional Network for CIOs and IT Professionals – E-Discovery: A Growing Trend For Increasing Efficiencies Using IT.

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Survey: Fear of Corruption Leads Companies to Pass Up Business

April 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

On the heels of the U.K.’s guidance on its new Bribery Act comes a survey that suggests businesses are deeply concerned about global corruption. Downright gloomy, in fact. One of the few upbeat responses concerns the new British law, about which compliance professionals are described as “most optimistic.”

Beyond that, there wasn’t much to cheer about in the biannual Dow Jones State of Anti-Corruption Survey, released on Thursday.

“At face value these findings support the view that anti-bribery and corruption regulation damages business and is ineffective in stopping corporate bribery,” said Rupert de Ruig, managing director of Risk & Compliance at Dow Jones & Company, in a press release that accompanied the results.

But he did see a possible silver lining. “There may be a stronger argument that the findings are an indication of higher standards and controls in companies,” he suggested, “and an increasing awareness of bribery and unethical business practices in the marketplace.”

Again, on the bright side: Almost three-quarters of the companies have anti-corruption programs in place, and they’re implemented consistently across all regions and industries. Most programs have been established for at least three years.

Yet half the companies have delayed or called off new business opportunities because corruption risks could not be assessed. And more than half have avoided deals for fear of violating regulations.

via Survey: Fear of Corruption Leads Companies to Pass Up Business.

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Survey: More Than 60% of U.S. Small Businesses in Danger of Losing Critical Emails | Business Wire

March 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

GFI Software, a leading IT solutions provider for small and medium-sized enterprises, today announced the results of an independent survey conducted by Opinion Matters, in which more than 200 U.S.-based IT decision makers participated. The study commissioned by GFI revealed a dramatic lack of adoption of email archiving. 62.4% of SMEs do not currently use a mail archiving solution – opening the door to a host of issues including: limited email backup and restore, which could lead to data loss; an inability to search for pertinent messages in the event of an audit or eDiscovery request – which could result in costly compliance violations or legal suits; strain on Exchange servers; and storage problems.

“Email infrastructure is quickly becoming a complex beast, and IT administrators have more factors to consider than ever before – including an increasing level of compliance standards that many are apparently unaware of”

The survey also revealed that greater than 38% of the 202 businesses polled do not have an archiving or backup solution of any kind in place, further exacerbating the chances that a network failure could result in a complete loss of critical data stored in email.

Additional results from the survey:

Two-thirds (66.8%) of respondents were unfamiliar with U.S. regulatory compliance standards regarding email archiving. This number ballooned to over 90% in businesses that rely on only one IT professional.

37% said they are required to search for old or deleted emails on a monthly basis, if not more frequently, because of requests from end users, the need to meet compliance requirements, the need to provide copies of correspondence for a lawsuit or audit, or any other requirements.

31% of respondents said they would consider a hosted approach to email archiving.

via Survey: More Than 60% of U.S. Small Businesses in Danger of Losing Critical Emails | Business Wire.

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