2022 TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
A Natural Evolution: Bringing Document Review In-House Bill Piwonka, Exterro
CCBJ: What trends are you seeing regarding the importance of document review? Bill Piwonka: We’re seeing more corporations bringing document review in-house, as opposed to having a blanket policy of always using outside legal service providers or law firms to assist with it. There are several different reasons for this. One is an acknowledgement that there are several different business use cases that relate to document review. Certainly e-discovery review is a key use case. But organizations also need to do document review for internal investigations, or when they are complying with a data subject access request under GDPR or CCPA/CPRA. It’s also critical when responding to a security incident or breach
Bill Piwonka Bill Piwonka oversees all marketing functions for Exterro. His background is firmly rooted in B2B marketing operations. During the past 20 years, Bill has led marketing teams and initiatives spanning strategy, product marketing, product management, demand generation, marketing communications and business development. Prior to joining Exterro, he served as the vice president of marketing at Janrain.
to quickly determine if potentially compromised data contains personally sensitive data that would trigger regulatory reporting or notifications. So, you now have all these different use cases that require document review and it just becomes so much more effective to do that in-house, depending on the size and scope. This certainly isn’t to suggest that document review will never be outsourced, because there may be very, very legitimate reasons for doing so: the size, scope, nature, resourcing and that sort of thing. But one of the trends that has been rock solid over the past seven or eight years is how much the C-suite is looking to legal to improve its productivity and efficiency and cut costs. And when you can do document review in-house, you’re going to gain efficiencies, productivity and visibility into the process and you’re certainly going to minimize your costs. What are you advising clients about effective incident management? There are several different things that need to be considered. First and foremost, you need to understand where your data is. In e-discovery, for years consultants and experts have said, “You’ve got to do data mapping.” And I just can’t emphasize enough how important having a comprehensive data inventory is because you
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