In their last article, Compliance discussed the recent data privacy legislation in Europe and the US. That recent data privacy legislation has made a significant impact on workflows that support eDiscovery and litigation, as well as other use cases. It’s even creating brand new workflows that didn’t previously exist to support requests from individual data subjects!
Their latest article in the data privacy series (Data Privacy is Driving Changes to eDiscovery Workflows and Even Creating New Workflows) discusses several ways data privacy has driven changes to eDiscovery and litigation. Here’s one of them:
Identifying PII in Data Collections
As recently as seven years ago, panelists at an education session at Georgetown Law School’s Advanced eDiscovery Institute discussed issues associated with privacy in eDiscovery and it was evident that many considered privacy as an after-thought. That’s not the case today. eDiscovery workflows now commonly include leveraging technology to identify Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
Approaches to PII can be as simple as pattern matching through regular expressions to locating personal data such as social security numbers, phone numbers, credit card numbers and more. The use of machine learning and AI technologies can also be utilized to train algorithms to locate more complex personal data, such as Protected Health Information (PHI), ethnic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs and more. The requirement to identify PII is so common these days that many of these mechanisms are automated and can identify and highlight PII in a matter of minutes. Once identified, steps are taken to protect individuals’ PII, including redaction and/or encrypting productions.
That’s just one of the impacts that changing data privacy has had on eDiscovery and litigation. So, what are the others? Find out here. And please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
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