Beyond the finish line: Why the real race begins with CLM Post-Implementation Support
Time: Tuesday September 10, 2024 – 2:00 PM EST | 11:00 AM PST While the journey to implement a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) system is a significant achievement, it’s just the starting point. The true challenge—and opportunity—lies in what comes next: post-implementation support. Join an insightful webcast where we explore why the real race begins after the CLM system is up and running. In this session, industry experts will delve into the critical importance of a CLM post-implementation strategy. We will discuss how continuous support not only ensures system stability and compliance but also drives ongoing improvements and maximizes ROI. Learn about best practices for maintaining and optimizing your CLM system, common pitfalls to avoid, and strategies to ensure long-term success. What you’ll learn: The vital role of post-implementation support in the CLM lifecycle Best practices for maintaining and optimizing your CLM system Strategies to ensure compliance and system stability How to drive continuous improvement and maximize ROI Common challenges and how to overcome them Whether you are new to CLM or looking to enhance your current system, this webcast will provide valuable insights to help you navigate the post-implementation phase effectively. Register Here
The Art & Science of Marketing
Free Virtual Event The Art & Science of Marketing Keeping your creative, sales and data teams working in harmony On Monday, August 19, Integreon will partner with the Financial Communications Society (FCS) to present a free virtual event on “The Art & Science of Marketing.” Featuring a panel discussion with marketing executives from leading financial brands, we will focus on how to keep your creative, sales and data teams working in harmony. Register Here We’ll explore questions like: How do you ensure that your teams are all aligned and what methods do you put in place to foster collaboration and prevent silo-ing? What role does your data/tech team play in optimizing and executing campaigns? What safeguards and processes do you have in place to ensure the data collected by your tech team is compliant with regulations? How do you strategically repurpose content to maximize value and reach? What collaborative processes do you use to streamline content creation and distribution? How do you help each department understand the impact of their work on overall business outcomes? As trust is paramount in financial services, how do your teams work together to foster trust and transparency? Our panelists include: Moderating the discussion will be Murray Joslin, EVP of Creative & Business Solutions at Integreon
Integreon Announces Early Adopter Program for Integreon i-Scan, a First-of-its-Kind Preventative Cyber Solution
i-Scan enables organizations to proactively identify sensitive data points that if addressed could significantly reduce reputational and financial risk in the event of a cyberattack AUSTIN, TX AND LONDON (July 25, 2024) – Integreon, a global provider of legal, creative, and business outsourced solutions and a pioneer in the cyber incident response (CIR) space, announced today the launch of an early adopter program for its latest cyber technology offering, Integreon i-Scan. This powerful and easy to implement solution scans an organization’s data locations to generate a heat map detailing sensitive data and potential risk levels in the event of a cyberattack. i-Scan follows the successful development and launch of CyberHawk-AI, the industry’s first machine learning (ML)-based data mining tool that speeds up the manual review process without compromising quality or contextual understanding. “Sensitive data is ultimately what the threat actors are after in hopes of lucrative extortion,” said Frank Luzsicza, Founder & CEO, Blue INK Security, a participant in the early adopter program. “Many organizations lack visibility as to where their most sensitive data is stored and what security controls are in place to protect it. i-Scan is the first solution we have seen providing that visibility and we are excited about sharing it with our clients.” As data breaches continue to rise, the exfiltration of sensitive data has increasingly been a driver of ransomware adversely impacting many businesses. Threat actors’ ability to gain access to that data puts them at a significant advantage, enabling them to extort astronomical sums of money for its release. Most prevention strategies have historically addressed infrastructure security and related vulnerabilities. Integreon recognized an unaddressed need to help organizations understand and proactively manage the potential risk of their sensitive data. All organizations, both large and small, are facing attacks and the cost associated with a breach continues to increase. According to the IBM Cost of a Data Breach report for 2023, organizations with fewer than 5,000 employees reported that the average impact of a data breach increased nearly 20 percent last year and the cost between $3-5 million. i-Scan is a generative AI-based solution that scans a client’s data locations to identify and map sensitive data and where it is stored. While it searches for a pre-determined set of sensitive data points, i-Scan’s large language model (LLM) can easily be trained to scan for additional bespoke data points relevant to an organization. Having an outline of the internal data stored in their systems, organizations can now improve their data governance by making informed risk mitigating decisions, such as removing or further securing sensitive digital information. If threat actors are unable to find and exfiltrate high-value sensitive data, they will be left with minimal leverage to demand payment. “We harnessed the experience of reviewing over 35 million breached documents in the past seven years and the collective experience of our cyber incident response team in the development of i-Scan,” said Anshu Gupta, President of Integreon and cyber solutions business leader. “As cyber threats continue to plague businesses of all sizes, we see i-Scan as a simple yet highly effective tool to decrease the fallout from a cyberattack.” Participants in the early adopter program include key cyber stakeholders such as insurance carriers, digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) firms, managed security service providers (MSSP) and law firms. Early adopters are actively using i-Scan with their clients to assess risk exposure related to stored data to take preventative actions. Following the early adopter program, i-Scan will be widely available in September 2024. i-Scan is available for deployment on-premises or as a cloud-based solution capable of scanning Linux and Windows computers and servers, MacOS computers, OneDrive, SharePoint and Google Drive. About Integreon For 25 years, Integreon has been the trusted, global provider of legal, creative and business outsourced solutions to corporations and law firms seeking to expand their capabilities and transform their performance. The company’s 3,500+ professionals provide round-the-clock support across a range of managed services—from legal and compliance to creative design, content delivery and administrative support—via global delivery centers on three continents. The company is recognized for technology innovation, including industry-first applications of AI-enabled solutions. Integreon is deeply committed to client success, consistently delivering innovative, tech-enabled solutions that improve agility and efficiency to drive business performance. Integreon is owned by EagleTree Capital, a leading New York-based, middle-market private equity firm with over $5 billion of assets under management. For more information about Integreon’s range of services, email [email protected], visit www.integreon.com and follow Integreon on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
Data, Documents and the eDiscovery Review Process – Are We Doing It Right?
Recently, a client asked their technology partner to export a list of documents and send to her by email; we assumed so she could print them and work on hard copy versions. In contrast, just a few minutes later, a different client mentioned to us that all their internal meetings were now taking place via VR headset. From paper to emails to VR (and everything in between), the diversity and volume of data is ever increasing. Careful planning, smart solutions, and bringing in the right expert and/or technology at the right time are more critical than ever. So, how do you ensure deadlines are met while keeping review costs in check when volumes appear insurmountable? Here are our top three tips: 1. Early Case/Data Assessment (ECA/EDA) Don’t underestimate the importance and value of careful ECA/EDA. Use the technology like a scout before you dive into deeper waters. You can gather important context that can help you understand the documents more intuitively. It can also provide a better sense of timeline so you can plan out the best course of action. You can also use it to screen out obviously irrelevant content immediately, such as junk images or potentially sensitive or graphic material, so you can focus more on substantive information. 2. Review Match the technology that best fits your data set. Take short message data as an example – whilst we have come a long way since unwieldy, poorly formatted Bloomberg messages, if short message data is converted to a near native format, then reviewing the material can be much simpler than using traditional document form. For example, when messages are converted to document form, embedded items will appear as family members and can over inflate the review volume. Portions of the messages might get separated further complicating the workflow. Artifacts from metadata can also appear and make the content difficult to read. Compare that to near native format, which presents the information as you would see it in everyday life in programs like Slack or Teams. Coupling this with a small core team can also yield additional benefits. If the same reviewer is tasked with the review of an entire conversation, it maintains context for better consistency. 3. Alternative Legal Service Providers Partnering with an experienced ALSP to increase efficiency is not only a great option for the economical underlying rates, but also because a review expert can incorporate best practices and make matter specific recommendations. Additionally, capitalizing on ALSP expertise early in the process and not just at time of review can help build a strategic road map right from the start, which can avoid costly bumps and pitfalls down the line. Using modern films as a parallel, if you’ve ever seen a big budget movie with mediocre visual effects many times it is because the VFX team was introduced late in the process when most of the filming has wrapped up. On the other hand, productions that introduce a VFX consultant from the start, weaving them into the filming process, can provide useful feedback for blockbuster end results. A director alone may not consider things like lighting, scene composition and movement in relation to effects not yet implemented, but a VFX expert will have their eye trained on the future results and can provide valuable suggestions to make the entire process smoother with a better final product. Similarly, working in collaboration with you, a review expert can design and deploy at scale, a review workflow that delivers efficiency, proportionality and defensibility.
Gen AI is a Journey, not a Sprint
In every technology innovation cycle, there is a natural tendency to think that the newest innovation is the silver bullet for long-standing problems, almost magically. When AWS and Azure began to have meaningful market traction 12 years ago, the cloud promised lower cost, speed to market, evergreen compliant infrastructure, and a much more resilient and secure infrastructure. Many businesses succeeded on the cloud platform, such as Capital One in financial services, Netflix in media, and Airbnb in travel and hospitality. Today, it has become almost inconceivable to build solutions other than in the cloud. Yet, many companies failed to achieve the values cloud promised, even though they have made inroads into the cloud and have built the resemblance of a hybrid cloud architecture. When CIOs and CTOs meet privately, often you hear the stress signals that cloud added cost, that cybersecurity attack surface has increased not decreased, and talent for high-end automated cloud management is hard to come by. What is the difference between cloud winners and losers? How can the cloud adoption experience inform Gen AI adoption as we travel through the Gartner hype curve from excitement and intrigue to value creation? I believe that one of the key differences between the winners and the losers is the early recognition that transformative technology adoption is a journey, not a sprint, and certainly not a collection of a dozen use cases of plug-and-play technology implementation projects alone. A journey requires sustaining power, and a thoughtful multi-pronged approach to transform the organization that matters to customers and internal and external stakeholders. The transition to the cloud feels like it has taken place overnight. In reality, the journey took about 7-8 years. The number of files in AWS S3 grew from 2 trillion items to 100 trillion items from 2013 to 2021. To add another 180 trillion items to S3 took only two years in 2023. Similar statistics abound in other cloud services. In legal services, Technology Assisted Review (TAR) was first introduced around 2010 based on supervised learning methods. Continuous Active Learning (CAL or TAR 2) with unsupervised learning methods came to the market around 2014. Today, TAR and CAL have become accepted technology practices in document review if both litigating parties can agree. As of this writing, the overall TAR and CAL adoption is around 40% of the market, 14 years into the technology introduction. The wheels of justice do seem to move slowly and finely. Gen AI will likely see a much faster adoption curve. Legal services are saturated with unstructured data, which provides rich opportunities for Gen AI to transform the largely human-scale legal services industry. Legal departments and law firms are typically underserved by legacy corporate IT, which developed most of its capabilities around structured data. Many legal departments and law firms are thus well positioned to leap-frog digital transformation in unstructured data space by strategically leveraging the agility, innovation, process know-how, and economics of Gen AI-enabled service providers. How long will this Gen AI transformation journey take? My educated guess is 3 to 5 years for legal services and 5 to 7 years beyond legal. The exact timing is hard to tell, perhaps not even important. The point is it is not overnight, and it will happen much faster than we realize. As Bill Gates famously said: “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.“
Document Review Challenges: Strategies for Law Firm Litigation Professionals in 2024
Document review, the most expensive part of the eDiscovery process, often poses a formidable challenge for litigation professionals, especially in large-scale, complex cases. This task is further complicated by the need to juggle other responsibilities simultaneously. This also includes the introduction of new data types, ever increasing volumes of data, heightened cost pressure and, of course, the multifaceted discussion around the evolution of “AI” and technology. It’s fair to say, this can often be overwhelming. As such, careful planning, smart solutioning, and using the right expert at the right time is more critical than ever. Litigants expect their law firm litigators to focus on strategic legal advice and litigation strategy. Most law firm litigators do not want to spend extensive time assessing the legal tech landscape, developing workflows, managing the review process (and teams of review attorneys) while also balancing their client’s expectations, costs, and strict timelines. Firms should forge relationships with service providers that understand the technology landscape and have established workflows, processes, and a demonstrated track-record of quality. In this article, we delve into three of the main issues law firms face during document review and provide practical strategies to overcome them. 1. Volume and Complexity of Data The obligation to include electronically stored information (ESI) in discovery/disclosure came into force in the US just under 20 years ago (the UK followed suit a few years later). Since then, we have seen data types diversify and global data volumes increase significantly, and these trends in divergence and expansion of data do not show any sign of slowing down. Evolving Data Types New and nuanced data types can overwhelm traditional review methods. Fortunately, there is technology and skilled resources experienced in these types of data. Smartphone collections giving you a headache? Ask providers who specialize in targeted remote personal device collection to help. Struggling with short message or collaboration tool data? Consider outside-the-box solutions. There is technology out there that will help tackle unwieldy chat messages littered with images/videos (tools with near-native capabilities, for example) and ways to structure your review workflow to ensure maximum efficiency and consistency. It can help to utilize a small core team, so the full context is understood as the same individual is responsible for review of each conversation. Early Case Assessment/Early Data Assessment (ECA/EDA) “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” While there may be an argument about whether this is a Benjamin Franklin quote or not, its meaning extends across many aspects of our personal and professional lives, particularly for those living in the world of eDiscovery and litigation. By identifying key information and potential issues early on, legal teams can create a focused and efficient case strategy. This not only saves time and resources but also increases the chances of a favorable outcome for all parties involved. As such, it is critical to take the time to get it right but at the same time the process itself needs to be time efficient and cost effective. The power of ECA is further enhanced by advancements in technology. With the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics, attorneys can quickly and efficiently analyze large volumes of data to uncover relevant insights and patterns. However, none of this is possible without first conducting a robust early data assessment (EDA). EDA involves identifying, collecting, analyzing, and organizing relevant information early in the litigation process so that informed decisions can be made during the ECA process. If the right data is not identified and collected, the merits assessment undertaken as part of the ECA workflow is flawed and this can lead to considerable difficulty later in the process. Again, service providers with specialized skill sets and advanced technologies, are a viable solution to address and resolve issues faced during the EDA and ECA processes. They are experienced in managing vast volumes of data efficiently and processing them using the latest technology including AI and predictive analytics tools. This not only streamlines the overall approach but also ensures a higher level of accuracy in data interpretation. With their technical expertise, they can ensure the proper functioning of these tools, eliminating the need for additional training or external hires within the firm. 2. Gen AI can shift the focus of the legal profession from reactive to proactive Legal proceedings operate within strict timelines and deadlines. Law firms should look to streamline workflows, adopt efficient review methodologies, and prioritize tasks to ensure timely completion without compromising accuracy or thoroughness. Service providers can help litigators to leverage technology and craft the right delivery model to maintain quality and timeliness, at scale. This could include a multi-shore approach leveraging teams working round-the-clock. For law firm clients, document review is a notoriously costly phase of litigation. As such, firms are facing increased pressure to manage this expense while maintaining quality standards. Conversely, the firm is focused on profitability. Both sides of the coin can be satisfied through establishing a delivery model that also includes specialized cost-effective resources, and advanced technologies without the overhead costs associated with in-house review. 3. Document Review Process – Defensible, Adaptable Workflows are Critical Quality and Consistency Holding high standards of quality and consistency in document review is paramount for legal credibility and client satisfaction. A lack of methodology, misinterpretations, or insufficient review expertise can undermine reliability and accuracy. Law firms should collaborate with review process experts to establish a standardized, repeatable review process underpinned by three core pillars to ensure success – Training, Calibration, and Validation. Once that core process is in place, it may be necessary to flex and adapt to address the specific nuances of each particular matter. This is another instance where it is beneficial to work in partnership with a review expert to ensure the bespoke and adapted workflow remains efficient, proportionate, robust, and defensible. Technology Enabled Review Efficiency Integrating technology, such as AI, machine learning, and analytics, into document review workflows offers significant efficiency gains. However, litigators may encounter challenges such as resistance to change, concerns about
Case Study: GenAI-Enabled Contract Migration
Large data migration project sees 53% productivity gain using gen AI Client Global Fortune 500 data company Challenge With a new contract lifecycle management (CLM) system. the client had the daunting task of migrating over100,000 documents to the new platform and abstracting and populating 150 fields. Solution Client selected Integreon contracts migration services which include use of Leah Legal Copilot bringing added efficiency and cost-savings. The following highlights the benefits and savings of a generative artificial intelligence (gen AI)-enabled contracts data migration Key Takeaways Productivity Gain 53% increase with use of genAI. Easy to Implement Ready-to-go with pre-trained data. No Licensing Technology integrated as part of Integreon service. Quality Assurance Trained attorneys and legal engineers overseeing QC. Strict Security Policy Complete destruction of data after project completion. Cost Savings About Integreon Contract Management Services Transform your Contract Lifecycle Management Process Transactions lifecycle support Reduce cost, drive efficiency, and free up the capacity of your in-house team with Integreon’s CLM solutions. Our platform supports corporate transactions function across industries, continents, and complexity levels, offering both scalability and continuous improvement. More than anything else, Integreon is a delivery organization. We deliver innovative contract support services with the highest levels of quality assurance. And we do it cost-effectively. Global platform With delivery hubs operating from the US, UK, India and the Philippines, Integreon manages the contracting process for clients around the clock and in over 50 languages. Our multi-disciplinary organization deploys scaled, global staffing through an ISO certified delivery infrastructure, providing end-to-end support for transactions activity—from first-pass contract review to negotiation and closure. Data-driven and continuously improving Integreon’s customizable CLM dashboards and pattern analysis optimize transaction management. Our Business Excellence Support Team combines legal tech and process optimization expertise for a Six Sigma-based continuous improvement program, incorporating automation and analytics. As a result, our solutions streamline every aspect of contract lifecycle management, reducing costs and minimizing risks. Scalable partnership Whether your contracts department needs just a few extra hands on deck or a significant extension of capacity to manage whole categories of transactions with a non-strategic profile, Integreon offers a partnership that will scale according to your needs and evolve with your business over time. Our Contract Lifecycle Management solutions are tailored, not templated, and we work hard to ensure that your experience with our service is easy and escalation free. We are flexible, responsive, and reliable, offering everything the legal department’s leadership would expect of their own team. Read the full case study here
Thinking Outside the Box: Innovative Alternatives for Tackling High Volume Legal Processes presented by Integreon
Free CLOC Webinar Thinking Outside the Box: Innovative Alternatives for Tackling High Volume Legal Processes presented by Integreon In the fast-paced world of legal operations, managing high volumes of Subpoenas, Law Enforcement Responses, Garnishments, Levies, Liens, and DSAR’s can be a daunting challenge. These requests can present complex issues of jurisdiction and enforcement and a substantial, sometime insurmountable, constant burden on companies. Many of these repeatable processes can be outsourced at lower process points without increased risk, freeing key resources to focus on higher-value work. Originally part of the 2024 Solution Lab Series, you can now watch for free this insightful webinar where legal industry leaders from Liberty Mutual and DoorDash shared their innovative strategies and solutions for efficiently and effectively handling high volume, lower risk processes that are eating away at your shrinking budgets. What You’ll Learn: How they partnered with an ALSP to offload some of the burden, saving time and money How to identify and define processes that are ideal for outsourcing How best to select the ALSP that has the experience to help Use cases highlighting successful implementation of these strategies Best practices for ensuring compliance while maximizing efficiency