<b><i>Legal Tech</b></i><br>Making Sense of New Data Types in the App Age

It would be challenging enough if organizations only had to get their digital hands and policies around the more common enterprise applications, such as Microsoft's Office 365 (with 70 million monthly active users and growing) and G Suite from Google (adopted by more than 60% of the Fortune 500). But it is the explosion in cloud-based applications that creates the biggest headaches — and greatest vulnerabilities — for today's IT teams. Whether Slack, Trello, Box, Dropbox or Evernote, potentially discoverable data is being produced and stored in a dizzying array of applications. And the next “big-thing” app — that no one has heard of, but everyone will be using in six months — is just getting started today.

The reality is that this next “big thing” app is guaranteed to create problems for corporate legal and compliance teams just like last year's is doing today. When e-discovery kicks off for an investigation or litigation, it is now more difficult to assemble the new data with “old” data from traditional email and corporate data stores. Effective e-discovery requires the ability to easily and quickly gather all forms of data to understand the bigger picture. As organizations grow more global, mobile and collaborative, more critical interactions are taking place in these new channels. To address these issues, a corporation can take three important steps.