eDiscovery Daily Blog

Thinking Like a Millennial: How Millennials are Changing Discovery, Part Five

Editor’s Note: Tom O’Connor is a nationally known consultant, speaker, and writer in the field of computerized litigation support systems.  He has also been a great addition to our webinar program, participating with me on several recent webinars.  Tom has also written several terrific informational overview series for CloudNine, including his most recent one, Biggest eDiscovery Challenges Facing Plaintiff’s Attorneys, which we covered as part of a webcast on June 26.  Now, Tom has written another terrific overview regarding the impact of millennials on eDiscovery titled Thinking Like a Millennial: How Millennials are Changing Discovery that we’re happy to share on the eDiscovery Daily blog.  Enjoy! – Doug

Tom’s overview is split into five parts, so we’ll cover each part separately.  Part one was last Tuesday, part two was last Friday, part three was Monday and part four was Wednesday, here is the fifth and final part.

Conclusions and Recommendations

The favorite tools of millennials are in use now.  We know them. We are trying to adjust to them. But perhaps the problem is not the tools. We must acknowledge the cultural shift in work flows and communication methods influenced by millennials as more employees work remotely, including from home, than ever before. Then we must be prepared to design eDiscovery tools to deal with these changes.

Millennials will quickly and easily embrace new apps. They will employ collaboration and innovation to yield more effective workflows. Responding to those changes requires proactive planning not reactive responses.

Companies need to design and establish data retention policies and deletion protocols around these new tools. Engage custodians now to understand how they are communicating and collaborating at work. Understand that overlooked applications which you may consider informal mobile apps can, in reality, be the main form of communication for many employees.

Service providers need to develop new strategies and processes for collecting data from these new tools.  These new tools may be will be less uniform and more diversified in their deployment and this implementation may vary widely within departments of the company. This will require extensive collaboration with IT departments in order to understand how their tools are implements

Data growth is expanding at an enormous rate. In 2018, DOMO reported that “over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data were created every single day and it estimated that by 2020, 1.7MB of data will be created every second for every person on earth.  And, a recent report in the Visual Capitalist found the following:

  • 500 million tweets are sent daily
  • 294 billion emails are sent daily
  • 4 petabytes of data are created on Facebook daily
  • 4 terabytes of data are created from each connected car daily
  • 65 billion messages are sent on WhatsApp daily
  • 5 billion searches are made every day

By 2025, it’s estimated that 463 exabytes of data will be created each day globally – that’s the equivalent of 212,765,957 DVDs per day!

Source: Visual Capitalist

As technology advances, millennials will continue to blur the lines between personal and professional communications and the demand for faster and better tools and applications that are integrated with both work applications and personal social media will continue to create more and more data. This combination will place even more stress on the eDiscovery components of preservation and collection.

Companies and law firms will need to proactively identify and address all these new data sources and combinations by designing new internal policies while working with vendors to develop new collection tools.  Getting ahead of the technology curve is the best way to limit exposure to litigation risks and reduce the inevitable costs related to eDiscovery.

So, what do you think?  Have the habits of millennials impacted eDiscovery for your organization?  As always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation. Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

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