I recently interviewed Brad Harris, VP of Product and Service Delivery at Hanzo.  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 Brad Harris.

In part three with Brad Harris, we discussed the future landscape of business communications and what Brad and Hanzo is working on.

Doug Austin: Given the various ways we communicate in business today, what do you think the landscape of business communications will look like years from now and how will that impact eDiscovery workflows?

Brad Harris: I love that question. Think back ten years when we were just worrying about email. Collaboration tools like Slack didn’t exist. The rapid adoption of new technologies is changing the way we work and interact in compelling ways. I love listening to Salesforce’s CEO talking about the digital headquarters and their intent to make Salesforce a “Slack-first” platform and bring all that functionality to users’ fingertips.

I read an interesting article the other day where the author talked about collaboration as the new digital desktop. Historically, we think of the computer we use as our “desktop” — the place I go to interact with our applications and where we store information. Now tools like Slack are shifting us to a virtual desktop where all of our go-to productivity applications come to us inside Slack, rather than requiring us to connect to the 20+ tools we use daily separately. It’s so much more efficient to have everything accessible in one place.

So, if you look at tools like Slack and Teams, it’s only just the beginning. In five years, just imagine how different the world will be. The rapid pace of innovation will continue to drive more and more use of these types of tools. And that’s why I’m so excited about focusing eDiscovery on modern collaboration because I think that’s where all the data and interest is going to be in the coming years.

Doug Austin: What else would you like to tell our audience about what you and Hanzo are doing?

Brad Harris: It’s been a great interview. Thank you very much, Doug, for taking the time to speak with me about the trends surrounding collaboration, data discovery, and governance!  I think for Hanzo and myself, we’re looking to the future that collaborative data platforms bring to enterprises. We’re focused on building risk management solutions that encompass discovery processes, investigations, and risk management, among other types of risk posed by this trove of data. We’re developing tools that can deal with that complexity across many different data types and scale at performance to handle the massive data volumes.

We’re doing a lot of work around data visualization, reporting, and analysis tools to help inform you where the data that you’re looking for resides. We’re ensuring customers get to the relevant data, quickly and with full context.

We’re continually looking for opportunities to bring value in new ways. For example, we’re excited to support preserve-in-place using the Slack legal hold capability. Rather than having to collect to preserve, we can now provide the option of safeguarding data in place and then enabling targeted collections. By being able to intelligently collect, you can narrow down to likely channels of relevant information, especially if you ask questions that will help you determine what to collect. In fact, we can even use the data within Slack to help broaden or refine which custodians and conversations should be included in the case.  For example, maybe you don’t know who was part of the engineering team three years ago and which channels they were members of, but such information is available to discover. That’s what Hanzo has been focusing on – how we can leverage that information, and how we can use that not only for discovery but for enabling better internal investigations, addressing data privacy concerns or researching cybersecurity issues – all of that. These similar processes and techniques come together as we look to leverage these modern applications fully.

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

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

Disclosure: Hanzo 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 particular 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.