Angela Bunting is VP, eDiscovery at Nuix. She has just written a paper for Nuix called Collaborating in the Cloud: eDiscovery risks and opportunities. I caught up with her at ILTA and asked about some of the subjects covered by her paper. The video interview is below.

It is not volume alone which is causing eDiscovery difficulties. Companies are finding new ways to communicate and collaborate beyond email and, as Angela Bunting says in her paper, “a recent survey of in-house counsel said their largest challenge next year would be the volume, variety, and veracity of disparate data”.

It is not just organisations who are finding new ways to communicate – individuals do so as well, and if their preferred way of working is easier then the organisation’s way, then they will do it their way. This gives rise to the growing trend of “shadow IT”, the use of applications and media which are not authorised or controlled by the IT department but which handle information which may simultaneously risk-filled and potentially valuable to the organisation. Much is transmitted these days by emojis, not the easiest form of data to interpret.

As Angela Bunting says in this interview, IT departments used to be in control but it is now hard for them to say where data lies. To some extent it can be flushed out by forensic investigators (when trying to implement a legal hold, for example), but there is no substitute for the old-fashioned means of discovering information by going round with a notebook and asking people how they work and what tools they use.

Angela Bunting talks also about the growing issue of dealing with voice communication. Organisations are increasingly capturing audio recordings and, among the many difficulties which this brings, is the problem that only a fraction of a conversation might be relevant. Nuix has integrated Voci’s V-Discovery speech analytics platform to help extract useful information from voice.

These disparate and ever-changing sources of information only really become valuable in the discovery context when you can show how they interplay with calendar, email and other records of a user’s day, something Nuix is very good at.

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