Mitigating Social Media Risk at the Florida Bar Association

http://onforb.es/VoBCdQ Rawn Shah, Contributor

I write about work ethos, collaboration & management evolution.

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6/25/2014 @ 5:10PM

Mitigating Social Media Risk at the Florida Bar Association In a legal case, any communications exchanged can be relevant. Our interactions in online social environments in personal or commercial cases are increasingly being sought and deposed into court cases. According to compliance software vendor, Actiance, the number of cases has grown by 66% in the last year. Companies that are unable to produce these records face fines; for example, the U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) recently fined Barclays Capital, Inc. $3.75M last December for failure to preserve such electronic records. It is a risk possibility for any company, and needs some level of mitigation.

The Florida Bar Association is taking proactive measures to mitigate just that risk on communications by people in their organization. The 100+ staff members of the Florida Bar serve the 98,000+ members of the association and the general public. I recently spoke to Jonathan Israel, IT Operations Manager for the Florida Bar to investigate how they changed their process and what exactly it improved.

While they had been saving their email for some time, the staff found the archives difficult to access and search. In addition, they had different systems between case management and email. Each query required the help of the IT team to pull the relevant emails into the case records and any of their interactions over social media.

The use of social media channels like Facebook and Twitter is rapidly rising in all types of organizations. In an interview with Scott Whitney, VP of development at Actiance back in January, he shared how social media information presents several different challenges from a permanent archival and compliance viewpoint.

First, the information is rapid and voluminous, so you need a rapid real-time archival system. Then, while the information tends to be short, there is other metadata such as the time it occurred, to whom it is visible, the people mentioned, and any attached data (e.g. video, images, etc.) Finally, in some cases, you can edit and modify the earlier posts on the social environment. This then alters either the original content or metadata. With legal documents in the

case of the Florida Bar, such dynamic information poses definite challenges. You can imagine that when someone said something in a court case could be just as important as what was said.

According to Mr. Israel, the Florida Sunshine law allows anyone in the public to request any information on past cases, and the Florida bar had to do the due diligence to discover and retrieve the information in a timely manner. Previously, whenever someone made an inquiry, they asked the Records Manager, who would then try to formulate a search query that was then handed to the IT staff. These queries typically tended to be broad and resulted in massive searches across multiple archive systems. The turnaround time for a query typically took days and weeks.

The Florida Bar turned the problem to Actiance. The Bar already had Actiance Vantage in use for policy and compliance management of their internal IBM Connections collaboration environment. They also had Actiance Socialite to manage compliance when employees use public social sites like Twitter and Facebook. What they needed now was a way to archive all the information perform eDiscovery across this data.

They turned to Actiance’s Alcatraz service that aggregates the data into a secure cloud, and allows end-users to perform queries directly. With the vendor’s help, the IT team integrated the multiple records systems and created an easy-to-use new interface. The Records Manager at the Florida Bar could now build the eDiscovery queries directly and search across the system. (Because some cases have confidential information, the public is not allowed to search the system directly, and must work with the Records Manager.)

The real gain: the time it takes to do complete searches of the records went from days and weeks at a time, to minutes and hours. It saves the organization substantial time in processing requests, and makes the public customers much happier.

This is still an early roll out for the Florida Bar, so they have yet to measure the average savings of the system exactly. It is also their first large deployment into a cloud-based environment. So far, the early wins by reducing the time by one or two magnitudes is heartening.

Rawn Shah is an independent analyst, blogger, and Chief Strategy Officer for Alynd. Inc.