I recently interviewed David Greetham, Information Governance and eDiscovery business unit leader at Ricoh USA, Inc.  We covered so much with regard to eDiscovery trends that we couldn’t fit it all in a single blog post.  Part One of my interview was published Monday, part two was published Wednesday, here is part three with David Greetham, the conclusion of our interview.

In part three with David Greetham, we concluded the interview by discussing data privacy challenges, budgetary challenges, addressing trends to the left of the EDRM model and what David and Ricoh USA are working on!  🙂

Doug Austin: With GDPR, CCPA and many other data privacy regulations having been passed or in the works that require organizations to understand where personal data resides, what recommendations do you have for those organizations to better position themselves to support those increased data privacy requirements?

David Greetham: It all starts with a full understanding of the requirements. If you were to ask five different people what GDPR is, you might get at three different answers, if not more. Establishing a common understanding of the requirements is paramount, whether it’s GDPR or some other new privacy regulation. It’s also important you have at least a high-level understanding of the potential ESI subject to privacy regulations in your environment. To do that, a lot of organizations have created data maps, which can be a useful starting point but it tends to focus on hardware, storage capacity, capacity utilization, and so forth. But the standard data maps don’t really get into intelligence about the types of data.

There needs to be an understanding of what actually resides within these storage devices. Information governance, tracking processes, and expertise certainly help in addition to programmatic ways of identifying the ESI that is subject to privacy laws. Simple GREP expressions and other pattern searches can also be helpful to identify that ESI.

I see these challenges as an opportunity for Information Governance experts, supported by analytics, artificial intelligence, and business intelligence. This could become the standard to help not only fulfill compliance requests, but to create a proactive awareness of the ESI risk too.

Doug Austin: According to reports since the pandemic, organizations are more “budget challenged” than ever.  What can organizations do to position themselves to do more with less in supporting litigation and other eDiscovery use cases and how is Ricoh USA helping them do that?

David Greetham: People have often used proportionality as a form of defense to simply avoid producing a large amount of data, but proportionality in the true sense needs to be fully embraced. What is proportionate to the matter at hand? If you combine proportionality with business intelligence, expertise and the investigative process, this could make a big impact on costs in relation to responding to eDiscovery requests. At Ricoh, to help reduce costs we encourage self-service, automation, deployment of artificial intelligence technologies, combined with subject matter expertise from an information governance perspective. This results in a much more granular focus, which ultimately has a more efficient and less expensive outcome.

Doug Austin: With all of these influences to the further left of the EDRM model, what is Ricoh USA doing to address these trends and challenges?

David Greetham: Over time, if you look at EDRM model, it’s been commonly believed that the right-hand side is the most expensive and the left-hand side is where you have all your data. At Ricoh, we’re taking an approach to look at how we make the right-hand side less painless and less expensive by better addressing the left side. I believe starting with the source of the ESI (prior to any preservation or collection) is key to a more effective, efficient and less expensive outcome.

Our information governance consultants are working with clients to create a more advanced data map. Understanding where that ESI resides and what kind of ESI it is. The end result is to limit the volume of ESI that comes from the corporation to either the eDiscovery service provider or to the law firm and that is going to help with the potential volume and pains of the right-side process, which will have a big impact in reducing costs overall.

Doug Austin: What else would you like to tell our audience about what you and Ricoh USA are working on?

David Greetham: As the industry looks for best in class security, advanced automation, increased use of artificial intelligence, to get more focused and reduce costs, we’ve positioned ourselves to support all of these goals. It starts with subject matter expertise, with a focus on providing highly relevant business intelligence to our client partners, to position them to make effective decisions and ultimately achieve their goals.

Great! Thanks, David, for appearing on the eDiscovery Today Thought Leader Interview series!

So, what do you think?  Hope you enjoyed part three with David Greetham!  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclosure: Ricoh USA is an Educational Partner and sponsor of eDiscovery Today

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