http://onforb.

es/VoBCdQ
LEADERSHIP 6/25/2014 @ 5:10PM
Mitigating Social Media Risk at the
Florida Bar Association
I write about work ethos, collaboration & management evolution.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
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
Rawn Shah, Contributor
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 Actiances Alcatraz service that aggregates the data into a secure
cloud, and allows end-users to perform queries directly. With the vendors 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.
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 Actiances Alcatraz service that aggregates the data into a secure
cloud, and allows end-users to perform queries directly. With the vendors 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.