http://onforb.es/VoBCdQ Rawn Shah, Contributor
I write about work ethos, collaboration & management evolution. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
LEADERSHIP
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