The Changing Legal Technology Landscape

We have been witnessing a dramatic, largely digitally-driven business transformation, affecting many industries over the last decade. The term most often used to describe this phenomenon is “digital transformation,” even though non-digital business structural changes most often accompany it. 

Digitization and datafication are key elements in this kind of transformation. We have seen the impact of this phenomenon most clearly in the retail industry, where giants of yesteryear like Sears and Borders have fallen to more digitally agile contenders like Amazon, who have changed the retail landscape fundamentally. The impact of digital transformation on the legal profession and function has been less dramatic, but after spending a week at LegalWeek20 in NYC in February, it is clear that change is coming to the enterprise-focused legal profession as well.

The emerging changes in the Legal Industry can be characterized along the following five dimensions:

• The changing relationship between Corporate General Counsel and outside counsel
• The changing legal services model
• The growing impact of the data deluge
• The evolving legal technology landscape
• The increasing importance of data security and privacy

The growing tension and disconnect between corporate general counsel and outside law firms

Experts suggest that the disruptive changes in the legal industry began after the 2008 downturn when companies started demanding more from their outside counsel. Today’s law firms find themselves under greater pressure from clients who demand value, efficiency, and transparency in a way that was uncommon ten years ago. The past decade has seen General Counsels (GCs), demanding more for less, but it has also seen a growing awareness that return on investment (ROI) is more important than just the cost.

The shift that began a decade ago, also began the gradual death of the traditional approach to legal billing, the venerated billable hour. Previously, outside counsel time was literally equivalent to money. Lawyers had little incentive to be more efficient and saw no reason to spend non-billable time exploring and deploying new technologies to make themselves more efficient. This traditional approach is changing now, as firms can no longer rely solely on their legal expertise; today, they must increasingly focus on how they deliver that expertise, which calls for increased use of technology and benefits early adopters of disruptive technologies. Legal services have been a buyers’ market for the past decade and corporate law departments now like to see clearly defined value and efficiency.

All this is happening against a backdrop of changing buyer behaviors accelerated by rapid globalization across the whole professional services market. The corporate legal department has historically often been viewed as “deal killers,” but the modern legal department is now often a much more engaged internal business partner in emerging corporate initiatives. Modern legal departments have increasingly shifted their approach to manage the specific changes created by digitalization — today, corporate legal counsel engages with more stakeholders, interacts with more speed and iteration, and are accustomed to the increased technical and collaborative nature of digital work, in addition to handling new information-related risks. The increasingly technologically aware workforce is upping its expectations in terms of the use of technology and effective, rapid communication between service providers and clients.

Technology is changing the general counsel’s role, and law firms need to react to remain competitive. The time has come to embrace emerging technologies that provide clients with efficient solutions to manage and service their current and future needs. Client expectations are changing, technology is having an increasing impact, and new, low-cost legal service competitors are emerging to take a slice of the market. What was already a buyer’s market is becoming more so, with increasingly powerful in-house legal departments stoking up the market for alternative legal service providers (ALSPs).

Some GCs and consultants have even developed tests to measure their outside law firms on how efficiently they perform with commonly used productivity tools and measure competence with widely used technology. These tests reward efficiency, which goes against the yardstick that old-style lawyers have traditionally used to value their work: time. Firms whose working cultures do not evolve to service current market needs efficiently, are likely an endangered species. Law firms need to deliver better quality service, and they need to do it cheaper and faster, which demands more automation and competence with technology. Clients are now much less tolerant of old-style lawyers who resist or refuse to use technology that enables expedited and efficient work production.

In his book “The End of Lawyers?” author and legal tech expert Richard Susskind writes: “It is not easy to convince a group of millionaires [Old Partners at Law Firms]... that their business model [the billable hour] is wrong.”

Law departments are now at what Judith Flournoy, CIO at international law firm Kelley Drye & Warren terms “an inflection point,” where they are likely to have to accelerate their uptake of technological innovations to stay competitive. Competence with analytics, collaboration and office productivity software is increasingly a base requirement for the client today.

The changing legal services market

As the needs of GCs change, we see corporate law departments are in-sourcing more legal work, using more tools and technology that reduces the need for outside counsel, and are using more boutique law firms and quasi legal-service providers (Alternate Legal Service Providers - ALSP).

The traditional structure of partners effectively running the business, with some carefully supervised and limited support services, is outdated today. The General Counsel today can not only shift to another law firm, but could also work with small specialist boutique law firms, and global accounting firms who are increasing their involvement with legal services. The smaller firms tend to be much more innovative, specialized, tech-savvy, and run leaner practices enabled by technology; and thus are often more competitive than large firms. The growing importance and practice of technology-enabled collaboration allow these new service providers to deliver much more integrated, efficient services resulting in deeper client relationships.

The 2017 Litera Report on the State of the Legal Market states: “The potential impact of the Big Four accounting firms on the future market for law firm services cannot be overstated [for firms in jurisdictions where alternative business structures are permitted]. As the ALSP market evolves, the Big Four are likely to play an ever-expanding role.” The Alternative Legal Service Providers market revenue grew from $8.4 billion in 2015 to about $10.7 billion in 2017 and continues to grow rapidly.

ALSPs perform many of the tasks traditionally done by law firms, with the top five tasks identified in a Thomson Reuters survey as:

• Litigation and Investigation Support
• Legal Research
• Document Review
• eDiscovery, and
• Regulatory Risk and Compliance

Ron Friedmann, a partner at Fireman & Company, a legal industry-focused management consulting firm, believes firms need to leverage an ecosystem of players. He says many of the future lawyers will not be lawyers at all. According to Friedmann, “In ten to fifteen years, law firms will be a much smaller share of the total legal market.”

 The ongoing data explosion

The volume and complexity of data have always been a part of the landscape in the legal industry. What is changing is the deluge of data is coming at ever-increasing speeds, increasing variety, and formats, and is also increasingly global and multilingual. The impact of this data explosion is significant, and most legal teams will admit this increase in content is a major challenge facing the legal profession today.

In eDiscovery settings, this also means that the information triage process is more challenging and requires much more automation to handle data volume and variety and increase the capability to deal with much more multilingual data.

The modern enterprise is now much more rapidly and naturally global, and thus the modern legal department and outside counsel need to be able to process content and information-flows in multiple languages regularly. The variety and volumes of multilingual content that legal professionals need to process and monitor can include any of the following:

• International contract negotiations and disputes
• Patent-infringement litigation
• Human Resource communications in global enterprises
• Customer communications
• GDPR compliance-related monitoring and analysis
• Cross-border regulatory compliance monitoring
• FCPA compliance monitoring

The volumes of multilingual content can vary greatly, from very large volumes that might involve terabytes of documents in litigation related eDiscovery, to specialized monitoring of customer communications to ensure regulatory compliance, to smaller volumes of sensitive communications with global employees. Multilingual issues are especially present in cross-border partnerships and business dealings, which are now increasingly common across many industries. Being able to process and analyze large volumes of multilingual data is becoming an increasingly more important requirement.

 The emerging legal technology landscape

Law firms can help general counsel drive efficiencies in business decisions by working together to determine what technology is most beneficial. Firms need to start adopting a collaborative teamwork approach not only with general counsel but also by cooperating with alternative service providers and the Big Four as collaborative partners. The general counsel is also looking for outside counsel to adopt a more client-centric model.

As automation penetrates more deeply into legal practice, we see that the role of technology grows in scope and breadth. Tools can range from a variety of analytics and collaboration tools to structured document management tools, end-to-end litigation, and eDiscovery platforms. More recently, comprehensive information governance tools are emerging to handle the increasing datafication of the modern enterprise, and manage the growing compliance risks involved in conducting business with an increasing digital footprint.

Rather than simply upgrading existing technologies, the true transformation only comes when law firms adopt a robust IT strategy that overhauls their services completely. Automation also only makes sense if it delivers on providing high-quality work more efficiently and delivers predictable value to the client.

“After all, if you’re paying for a service and one supplier, says, ‘that will take two weeks, and we’ll charge you by the hour,’ and another says, ‘that will take us two days, and we’ll charge a fixed fee’—which would you choose?”

Legaltech, notes Richard Tromans, founder of Tromans Consulting, is a “very wide spectrum.” At one end, there is document assembly and robotic process automation, taking the grind out of standard, repetitive work while reducing the time taken to perform tasks, saving costs, removing errors, and improving compliance. This kind of automation falls into the category of optimization. At the other end is natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and virtual assistants, which offer the possibility of really revolutionizing the future of legal services — and opens the door to the prospect of robot lawyers.”

As the volumes of data climb, tools that help lawyers to extract relevance and identify core patterns that become increasingly important. The legal technology community needs to move beyond making vague claims of being AI-based, to showing clearly how machine learning and data-driven algorithms can assist in delivering higher value to an expanding variety of legal tasks and processes.

The increasing importance of data security and privacy

Data security involves both preventing malicious attacks and limiting accidental data loss. However, the distributed nature of technology, enhanced by cloud services, creates vulnerability with employees increasingly working from remote locations, making it harder to secure data.

As DLA Piper partner—and former US Department of Justice cybercrime coordinator—Ed McAndrew observed, “The best evidence is now held in mobile devices and the apps, social networks, and cloud services we utilize with those devices. Any investigator or litigator who ignores that evidence may be committing malpractice in many instances.”

Recent surveys by Gartner suggest that legal leaders have to start investing in digital skills and capabilities, reflecting the evolving role of the legal department as a strategic business partner. “How legal departments build capabilities to govern risk within digital initiatives matters more than the legal advice they provide” says Christina Hertzler, Practice Vice President, Gartner.

Striking a reasonable balance between security and convenience is a challenge faced by all law firms. As organizations change the way they operate, generate revenue, and create value for their customers, new compliance risks are emerging — presenting a challenge to compliance oversight, which must identify, assess, and mitigate risks like those tied to fundamentally new technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence) and processes.

GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy protection regulations will present special challenges for the modern enterprise. Thus, while digital transformation initiatives require active data harvesting to enable better personalization, this data acquisition effort also needs to respect the privacy rights of consumers and customers who may or may not be aware of the extent of the data collection activities. Debbie Reynolds noted the information governance requirements of these regulations at LegalWeek recently. “The new reality is that navigating the data privacy rights of individuals everywhere will be an operational necessity for businesses to thrive in the digital age,” she said.

Legal professionals will need to play a larger role in managing these new risks, which can be devastating and cost millions in reparations and negative consequences. Increasingly these threats originate in foreign countries and sometimes even with support from foreign governments.

Apart from the compliance risks that clients face, law firms themselves are sought-after targets as repositories of privileged data. Law firms are a top target among hackers because of the extensive high-value client information they possess. Hackers understand that law firms are a “one-stop-shop” for sensitive and proprietary corporate information, merger & acquisitions related data, and emerging intellectual property information.

Lawyers are failing on cybersecurity, according to the American Bar Association Legal Technology Resource Center’s ABA TechReport 2019. “The lack of effort on security has become a major cause for concern in the profession.”

As more rapidly flowing multilingual data becomes the norm in global enterprises, new data security risks emerge as employees start using public machine translation to translate privileged business content. The risk is high because publicly available tools are essentially frictionless and require little “buy-in” from users who don’t understand the data leakage implications as they pass privileged content through these systems. The rapid rate of increase in globalization has resulted in a substantial and ever-growing volume of multilingual information that needs to be translated instantly as a matter of ongoing business practice. Multilingual data will become much more pervasive over the coming future as the forces of globalization march onwards.

However, this situation evolves, it seems clear that robust machine translation solutions will be needed for any enterprise or law firm with global ambitions.

Efficient and Effective Multilingual eDiscovery Practices Using MT

As outlined in a previous post, the global data explosion is creating new challenges for the legal industry that requires balancing the use of emerging technologies and human resources in optimal ways to handle the data deluge effectively.

The continuing digital communication momentum and the much more rapid pace of globalization today often create specialized legal challenges. The rapid increase in global business interactions, varying regulatory laws, business practices, and cultural customs of international partners and competitors are confounding and often frustrating to participants. The impact of all these concurrent trends is driving the volume of cross-border litigation up, and necessitates that corporate general counsel in global enterprises, and large law firms find the means to perform the critical functions related to manage the unique requirements of legal eDiscovery in these particular scenarios.

A recent Norton Rose Fulbright survey of litigation trends highlights the need for technology to enhance efficiency in legal departments and also points out the growth of cybersecurity and data protection disputes increasing across all industries. Additionally, the survey states that increasingly, international business operations lead to an increase in cross-border discovery and related data protection issues. The survey found that within the life sciences and healthcare and technology and innovation sectors, the most concerning area is IP/Patent disputes. IP/Patent disputes are regarded as relatively costly in comparison to other legal matters, and technology and life sciences companies, in particular, face large exposure in this area.

By understanding the unique discovery requirements of different regions, instilling transparency and consistency throughout the discovery team and process, and taking advantage of powerful technology and workflow tools, companies can be better equipped to meet the discovery demands of litigation and regulatory investigations. The multilingual impact of this data deluge is just now being understood, and as we move to a global reality where the largest companies and markets in the globe are increasingly not English-speaking regions, the ability to handle huge volumes of flowing multilingual data become a way to build competitive advantage, and avoid becoming commercially irrelevant. Being able to handle large volumes of multilingual data effectively is a critical requirement for the modern enterprise.

What is eDiscovery?

Electronic discovery (sometimes known as e-discovery, eDiscovery, or e-Discovery) is the electronic aspect of identifying, collecting and producing electronically stored information (ESI) in response to a request for production in a lawsuit or an internal corporate investigation. ESI includes, but is not limited to, emails, documents, presentations, databases, voicemail, audio and video files, social media content, and websites.

The processes and technologies around eDiscovery are often complex because of the sheer volume/variety of electronic data produced and stored. Additionally, unlike hard-copy evidence, electronic documents are more dynamic and often contain metadata such as time-date stamps, author and recipient information, and file properties. Preserving the original content and metadata for electronically stored information is required to eliminate claims of spoliation or tampering with evidence later in a litigation scenario.

EDiscovery is typically a culling process, of moving from unstructured to structured data – from unstructured data to matter-specific relevance, and the highest value and most directly relevant information.

Thus, while there are three primary activities typically in eDiscovery, namely, collection, processing, and review, it is clear to practitioners and analysts that the review-related activity is the bulk of the cost of the overall eDiscovery process.

One analyst estimates that review-related software and services are estimated to constitute approximately 70% of worldwide eDiscovery software and services spending in 2018. While the percentage of spending on the eDiscovery task of review is estimated to decrease to around 65% of overall eDiscovery spending through 2023, the overall spend in dollars for eDiscovery review is estimated to grow to $12.15B by 2023.

A respected RAND Institute study is even more explicit about the costs and shows very clearly that managing your data volume is critical to managing your costs. The Rand Institute for Civil Justice estimates that the per-gigabyte costs break down to $125 to $6,700 for collection, $600 to $6,000 for processing, and, in the most expensive stage, $1,800 to $210,000 for review. The costs for multilingual review are very likely even higher and by some estimates could be as much as 3X times higher.

"The RAND Institute for Civil Justice has estimated that each gigabyte of data reviewed costs a company approximately $18,000."

This means that a conscientious, defensible, proactive approach to information governance can lead to tremendous savings. Every gigabyte of outdated unnecessary ESI that you delete in following a uniform data destruction policy saves you, on average, $18,000 per case.

What is document review?

Also known simply as review, document review is the stage of the EDRM in which organizations examine documents connected to a litigation matter to determine if they are relevant, responsive, or privileged. The value of having robust information governance policies in place makes the overall process both more effective and more efficient. Due to outsourcing and the high cost of using lawyers, document review is the most expensive stage of eDiscovery. It is generally responsible for 70% or more of the total cost of eDiscovery.

The cost per hour for document review attorneys to review documents during the review phase of eDiscovery is one of the most expensive steps in the overall process, something which is only further exacerbated when the attorneys have to be bilingual at a high level of proficiency.

To control those extravagant costs, litigants strive to narrow the field of documents that they must review. The processing stage of eDiscovery is intended in large part to eliminate redundant information and to organize the remaining data for efficient, cost-effective document review. Technology that assists in the culling and close examination process is essential, and we see that eDiscovery platforms that assist professional services, law firms, and information technology organizations to find, store, review and create legal documents are increasingly pervasive.

Document review can be used in more than just legal eDiscovery for litigation. It may also be used in regulatory investigations, internal investigations, and due diligence assessments for mergers and acquisitions and other information governance-related activities. Wherever it is employed, it serves the same purpose of designating information for production and requires a similar approach.

The Multilingual eDiscovery process

It is possible to identify the critical steps involved in a typical multilingual eDiscovery use case where the key objective is to extract the most relevant information form a large volume of submitted material. The multilingual characteristics of much of the data that needs to be reviewed today adds a significant layer of complexity and an additional cost to the process.

The typical process involves the following key steps:

• Text Extraction: It is often necessary to extract multilingual text from scanned documents to ensure that all relevant documents are identified and sent to review.  OCR technology and native file processing technology to enable an enterprise to do this at scale. Sometimes it is also required to extract text from audio. 
• Automated Language Identification Processing:  Linguistic AI technology capabilities make automatic detection of languages and data sets within any content an efficient and highly automated process.
• Multilingual Search Term Optimization: Linguists work together with MT experts to generate critical search and terminology to ensure that multilingual data goes through optimal discovery related processing. This ensures that high volume automatic translations get critical terminology correct, and also enables the most relevant foreign language data to be discovered and presented for timely review. The multilingual search term consultant’s understanding of linguistic and cultural nuances can mean the difference between capturing critical information and missing it completely. Competent linguists ensure that grammatical, linguistic and cultural issues are taken into consideration during search term list development.
• Secure, Private, State-of-the-Art Machine Translation: Firms should work and develop secure, private, scalable enterprise-ready MT technology that can be deployed on-premise or in the private cloud. Integration with Relativity (and other eDiscovery platforms) makes it easy for companies to handle anything related to large corporate legal matters, from analyzing and translating millions of documents to preparing critical contracts and court-presentable documents.
• Specialized Human Translation Services: Many firms provides around-the-clock, around-the-world service using state-of-the-art linguistic AI tools to ensure greater accuracy, security reduced costs and turnaround time. The company has a pool of certified and specialized translators across multiple jurisdictions and languages worldwide who have expertise and competence across a wide range of legal documents. The company is already working with 19 of the top 20 law firms in the world. The translation supply chain is often the hidden weak spot in an organization's data compliance. Several firms provide a secure translation supply chain that gives you fully auditable, data custody of your translation processes and can be cascaded down through your outside counsel and consultants to create a replicable process across all of your legal service partners.

This is a post that was originally published on SDL.COM with more detail on SDL products  

The Global Data Explosion in the Legal Industry

As we consider and look at the various forces impacting the legal industry today, we see several ongoing trends which are increasingly demanding more attention from both inside and outside counsel. These forces are:

• The Digital Data Momentum
• Increasing Concern for Data Security
• The Growing Importance of Information Governance
• Increasing Globalization 

 

The Digital Data Momentum

Several studies by IDC, EMC and academics have predicted for years that we are facing an ever-growing data deluge and content explosion. The prediction that the digital universe will be 44 zettabytes by 2020 means little to most of us. But if you state that 500 million tweets, ~300 billion emails, 65 billion Whatsapp messages are sent, and 3.5 billion Google searches are made every single day, many more of us would understand the astounding scale of the modern digital world. While only a small fraction of this data will flow into the purview of the legal profession, the impact is significant and most legal teams will admit this increase in content is a major challenge today.

The enterprise is also affected by this content explosion, and a recent eDiscovery Business Confidence survey identified increasing data volumes as THE primary concern for the coming future. In eDiscovery settings, this also means that the information triage process is complicated since we are seeing not only significant increases in volume, but we are also seeing a greater variety of data types. The modern legal purview can include mobile data, voice and image data from various sources in addition to the data flowing in various enterprise IT systems. 

 Increasing Concern for Data Security

 

While data security has not been a concern in the past, it is increasingly being seen as a key concern. At recent Davos conferences, cybersecurity and data privacy breakdowns are seen as the biggest threats to businesses, economies, and societies around the world. According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), attacks against businesses have almost doubled in five years and the costs are rising too. “The world depends on digital infrastructure and people depend on their digital devices and what we’ve found is that these digital devices are under attack every single day,” said Brad Smith, president, and chief legal officer, Microsoft. He added that attacks by organized criminal enterprises are becoming “more prolific and more sophisticated”, often “operating in jurisdictions that are more difficult to reach through the rule of law but use the internet to seek out victims literally everywhere.”

This rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning also means that global enterprises are interested in acquiring and harvesting data, wherever and whenever they can. Businesses are looking to acquire as much information as possible, about customers, interactions, brand opinions, and extracting insights that might give them an edge over the competition. Data-guzzling machine learning processes promise to amplify businesses’ ability to predict, personalize, and produce. However, some of the world’s largest consumer-facing companies have fallen victim to data breaches affecting hundreds of millions of customers. By all measures, the disruptive, data-centric forces of the so-called fourth industrial revolution appear to be outpacing the world’s ability to control them.

Legal professionals will need to play a larger role in managing these new risks, which can be devastating and cost millions in reparations and negative consequences.  Increasingly these threats originate in foreign countries and sometimes even with support from foreign governments

 

 

The Growing Importance of Information Governance

 

The modern global enterprise has a very different risk tolerance profile from similar companies, even as recently as 10 years ago. The “datafication” of the modern enterprise creates special challenges for both inside and outside counsel.  Recent surveys by Gartner suggest that legal leaders have to start investing in digital skills and capabilities, reflecting the evolving role of the legal department as a strategic business partner.

“How legal departments build capabilities to govern risk within digital initiatives matter more than the legal advice they provide” says Christina Hertzler, Practice Vice President, Gartner.

To be digitally ready, legal departments must shift their approach to manage specific changes created by digitalization — more stakeholders, more speed and iteration, and the increased technical and collaborative nature of digital work, as well as handling new information-related risks.

As organizations change the way they operate, generate revenue and create value for their customers, new compliance risks are emerging — presenting a challenge to compliance, which must identify, assess and mitigate risks like those tied to fundamentally new technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence) and processes.

There is a growing list of US companies already subjected to GDPR-related EU regulatory actions, including, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Spotify, and Twitter. Indeed, the French Data Protection Authority, CNIL, recently levied upon Google a record fine of approximately $57 million dollars for “lack of transparency, inadequate information and lack of valid consent regarding ads personalization.” The risks to US companies include providing proof of measures taken to protect, process, and transfer personal data from the EU to the US in connection with regulatory investigations or litigation.  A report published in late February by DLA Piper cited data from the first eight months of GDPR enforcement, during which 91 fines were imposed. "We expect that 2019 will see more fines for tens and potentially even hundreds of millions of euros, as regulators deal with the backlog of GDPR data breach notifications," the report said. Taking meaningful steps now toward GDPR compliance is the best way for US companies doing business of any kind involving EU personal data—including those with no physical presence in the EU—to prepare for and mitigate their risk.

The penalties of non-compliance with regulatory policies continue to mount.  Google was fined $170 million and asked to make changes to protect children’s privacy on YouTube, as regulators said the video site had knowingly and illegally harvested personal information from children and used it to profit by targeting them with ads. We can only expect that data privacy and compliance regulations will be taken more seriously in the future and that legal teams will play an expanding role in ensuring this.

Facebook agreed to pay a record-breaking $5 billion fine as part of a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, by far the largest penalty ever imposed on a company for violating consumers' privacy rights. Facebook also agreed to adopt new protections for the data users share on the social network and to measures that limit the power of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Under the settlement, which concludes a year-long investigation prompted by the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, the social networking giant must expand its privacy protections across Facebook itself, as well as on Instagram and WhatsApp. It must also adopt a corporate system of checks and balances to remain compliant, according to the FTC order. Facebook must also maintain a data security program, which includes protections of information such as users' phone numbers. The issue of data privacy and compliance will continue to build momentum as more people understand the extent of the data harvesting that is going on.

Taking meaningful steps now toward robust information governance and compliance for all kinds of privileged and confidential data will be necessary for the modern digital-centric enterprise, and the modern legal department will need to be able to be an active partner and help the enterprise prepare for and mitigate their risk.

 

Increasing Globalization = More Multilingual Data

 

While these forces we have just described continue to build momentum, driven by increasing digitalization and the resultant ever expanding content flows, we also have an additional layer of complexity: language. The modern enterprise is now much more rapidly and naturally global, and thus now the modern legal department and outside counsel need to be able to process content and information flows in multiple languages on a regular basis. The variety and volumes of multilingual content that legal professionals need to process and monitor can include any and all of the following:

• International contract negotiations and disputes
• Patent-infringement litigation
• Human Resource communications in global enterprises
• Customer communications
• GDPR Compliance related monitoring and analysis 
• Cross-border regulatory compliance monitoring
• FCPA compliance monitoring 
• Anti-trust related matters

The volumes of multilingual content can vary greatly, from very large volumes that might involve tens of thousands of documents in litigation related eDiscovery, to specialized monitoring of customer communications to ensure regulatory compliance, to smaller volumes of sensitive communications with global employees.

Multilingual issues are especially present in cross-border partnerships and business dealings which are now increasingly common across many industries.

The AlixPartners Global Anticorruption Survey polled corporate counsel, legal, and compliance officers at companies based in the US, Europe, and Asia in more than 20 major industries. The perceived corruption risks are elevated in Latin America and China, and Russia, Africa, and the Middle East have emerged as regions of increasing concern. The survey found that 90% and 94% of companies with operations in Latin America and China, respectively, reported their industries are exposed to corruption risk. Of the 66% of respondents who said there are regions where it is impossible to avoid corrupt business practices, 31% said Russia is one such place and 27% cited Africa.

The sheer volume of information companies must collect, translate, and analyze is the biggest obstacle to tackling corruption, according to 75% of survey respondents. 

These concerns surrounding the management of data are expected to increase with increasing data privacy regulation such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.

 

 

End-to-end translation solutions for the legal industry 

Thus, we see today that language translation production capabilities have become imperative for the modern global enterprise and that the needs for translation can range from rapid translation of millions of documents in an eDiscovery scenario to very careful and specialized translation of critical contract and court-ready documentation. Given the volume, variety, and velocity of the information that needs translation, legal professionals must consider a combination of technology and human services. Ideally, solving these kinds of varying translation challenges would be done by technologically informed professionals who solve complex and varied translation problems and who can adapt language technology and human expertise to the challenge at hand. 

Several MT and language service vendors provide an enterprise-class, vendor agnostic, secure translation platform that allows you to combine regulatory compliance and translation best practice. Securing the translation supply chain needn’t come at the cost of trusted suppliers, existing relationships or impact time to market.

This blog was originally published on SDL.COM with more SDL product information.

The Use of Machine Translation in eDiscovery

There are some kinds of translation applications where MT just makes sense, and it would be foolish to even attempt these kinds of projects without decent MT technology as a foundation. Usually, this is because these applications have some combination of the following factors:

• Very large volume of source content that simply could NOT be translated without MT in any useful time frame
• Rapid turnaround requirement (days, hours or minutes) for the content to have any value to the translation consumers
• A user tolerance for lower quality translations at least in early stages of information review
• To enable information and document triage when dealing with large document collections and help to identify highest priority content from a large mass of undifferentiated content. This process also helps to identify the most important and relevant documents to send to higher quality human translation.
• Translation Cost prohibitions (usually related to volume)

One can find this combination of requirements in several customer communications oriented applications like technical support knowledge-base, eCommerce product listings, customer service, and CX reviews for all kinds of products and service experiences. However, in an increasingly digital world, we see the need to be able to process large volumes of business content to identify what is most relevant and valuable for ongoing business mission needs as well. One such business information triage application is eDiscovery. In my time in working with MT, I have seen that this is an ongoing need that will continue to build momentum as we become digitally focused workers.

SYSTRAN has been a leader amongst MT solution providers in the eDiscovery segment, and have a long track record of success in this segment, and from my vantage point, a greater sensitivity to the customer needs of this segment than most others. Recently, they gave me unhindered access to a few of their eDiscovery customers, who provided insight into what really matters in terms of MT from the user perspective. This post will describe some key requirements from an active user’s perspective, especially Alvarez & Marsal in London.  In particular, their willingness to share their insights enabled me to provide and validate my own observations made in the substance of this post. I have also had a previous guest post from iQwest that also described the use of MT in eDiscovery applications from a service provider perspective.

What is eDiscovery?

Electronic discovery (sometimes known as e-discovery, eDiscovery, or e-Discovery) is the electronic aspect of identifying, collecting and producing electronically stored information (ESI) in response to a request for production in a lawsuit or internal corporate investigation. ESI includes, but is not limited to, emails, documents, presentations, databases, voicemail, audio and video files, social media content, and websites.

The processes and technologies around eDiscovery are often complex because of the sheer volume/variety of electronic data produced and stored. Additionally, unlike hard-copy evidence, electronic documents are more dynamic and often contain metadata such as time-date stamps, author and recipient information, and file properties. Preserving the original content and metadata for electronically stored information is required in order to eliminate claims of spoliation or tampering with evidence later in a litigation scenario.

What typically happens with an initially large mass of documents in an eDiscovery scenario is that some combination of the following activities is run to help organize and identify the most important material from a large document mass (Not sure it is quite a corpus – usually it is much too unstructured to call it that). Practitioners use phrases like “analytics phase”, “predictive analytics”, “predictive coding”, or “analysis phase” to the process they apply to winnow the document mass into a relevant set of high-value documents. It usually includes:

Classification: Users gather a select representative set of the documents from the existing document mass that represents the key interests and relevance of subject matters to be analyzed.
Clustering: They build out documents selected in the classification stage to find similar documents that match required cluster definitions and algorithms of the representative documents.
Summarization: This organization assists the user in selecting key sections of these documents as keywords, phrases, and summaries for use in litigation or corporate governance applications.
N-Grams: N-Grams are the basic co-occurrence of multiple words that are within any context. These could help identify a set of documents that have higher relevance and value in specific investigations and review and be useful in the winnowing process, or in understanding the linguistic profile of the mass of documents

The EDRM model overviews the typical process journey to increased relevance

Thus, after organization, collation and identification documents are sent to a translation process which will often require MT because of the sheer volume. MT allows the right documents to be identified for further refinement (with human translation) or analysis and review. This identification of a smaller set of more important documents from a large set is the essence of the triage process.

“Our projects are varied and are not all focused around litigation. For example we often perform regulatory exercises and investigations. In these situations, it is often not known at the onset what is required; therefore, the culling of data is based more upon an investigative nous [investigative mindset] and the utilization of analytics features such as document categorization or clustering. In this instance, samples of various documents, related to different investigatory routes, are sent for translation to [MT to] help our teams develop an understanding of the data. The ability to provide our investigators with the option to translate documents on the fly is also a massive benefit in these types of matters.” Alvarez & Marsal, UK

In terms of languages that matter in eDiscovery, the sense I get from my investigation is that it is quite diverse, but a lot of the work involves going from a variety of source languages into English (or German). Some say that CJK and FIGS matter most in an increasingly global world, but the needs are always case-specific so it can be as far ranging as Greek, Norwegian, and Swedish. In terms of subject domains of focus, we see that in the litigation scenarios, product liability, and patent infringement tend to dominate, but these categories could cover a wide range of domains ranging from consumer electronics, IT, automotive, pharmaceuticals/medical equipment, to financial and also extractive industries.

While many equate eDiscovery projects only with litigation related content, the market beyond litigation seems to be growing just as rapidly. In an increasingly digital world, the need to understand electronic data flows within a global enterprise for information governance needs can be useful for many different reasons as A & M again point out:

“Alvarez & Marsal get instructed on a very wide range of matters, including contentious projects around internal investigations, dispute resolution, insolvency, and compliance programs. However, not all of them are contentious in nature – for example, performance improvement and valuations. A common thread is that they are document ‘heavy’ and therefore require our skill sets to effectively conduct them. The use of the technology differs in each scenario. As a result, understanding the client requirements and the capabilities of the technology allows us to devise suitable workflows for handling the documents. However, where foreign languages are involved we use Systran translation technologies to the same effect. “

eDiscovery is basically a data culling and relevance ranking process

What Matters in an MT Solution for eDiscovery?

• Rapid and Straightforward Accessibility: Attorneys, corporate governance and compliance professionals who function from within an eDiscovery platform environment need to be able to operate MT with ease. And most typically this will be from directly within the document analysis and organization platform that is the key application for many of these professionals. However, in very large cases documents may be sent in bulk to MT, but again the ability to manage and review relevant documents from within the review platform is a key requirement.
• Language Identification: One of the first steps in classification and organization of documents is to group documents by source language and thus this is a critical step in the process. The ease and efficiency of this language identification process is very important for many users, as it is the first level of triage. Also, some languages may need different processing flows if MT is not available and non-automated procedures need to be incorporated. The ability to automatically identify the source language on-the-fly for a large variety of languages is also a key requirement, as reviewers follow relevance threads and need ad-hoc translations of documents on-the-fly that are related to investigation subject matter. Often reviewers will submit a batch of documents that may be in different languages, thus an MT solution that can automatically identify and translate is an advantage, and allows batches of files to be uploaded without concern regarding what language they are in.
• Integration with the eDiscovery Platform: This needs to be much deeper than being able to pass source and target text files back and forth. Relativity is a particularly important document review platform in eDiscovery, especially in litigation scenarios. They also have been used extensively as the review platform of choice by many who care about processing multilingual content. One reason that SYSTRAN dominates in the eDiscovery segment is that they have a native Relativity connector. This is a “deep integration” that is built to integrate seamlessly into the software interface already familiar to Relativity users, and is built with Relativity best practices in mind, and validated by Relativity and their existing customers to provide value in real-world multilingual discovery cases. The deep integration with this platform not only allows single language identification and translation but also allows for multiple language identifications and translation within a single document, which is especially important for email threads. I have noticed over many years in the MT business that integration with a document review platform is a particularly important requirement, and while Relativity is not the only eDiscovery platform available, it is probably the most important one. Here is a Gartner Magic Quadrant for eDiscovery software where you can see that kCura (Relativity) is a leader.
• Ability to Process Primary Document Formats: This would at a minimum be emails, Office documents, text files, PDFs, web content, and increasingly social media content from Twitter and Facebook, as well as audio and video content. More and more, we see that emails are the most common document format that is processed in a review platform. Often an email thread could be in two or more languages and thus the market need for MT solutions that can handle multiple languages within the same document has become much more urgent and even a mandatory requirement.
• Security and Data Privacy: For some matters, users care that systems can be installed on-premise and that no data is transported outside a secure firewall. There are often data custody restrictions linked to projects which also greatly constrain what MT solutions can be used.
• Scalability - Ability to process Very Large Data Sets in addition to Ad-Hoc needs: Some cases may require that terabytes and even petabytes of data are involved. In such cases, MT efficiency can be a significant factor and drive MT system selection. On these very large PB sized projects, RBMT solutions have a clear advantage (in terms of performance and raw processing efficiency) and this perhaps also explains why SYSTRAN has been a long-term and dominant player in this market segment. They can provide a range of MT solutions that can meet different user requirements. The degree of automation should be such that 10,000 documents can be submitted with the same ease as 10 documents can.
• Easily Customizable: Customization of MT systems can vary in complexity and time investment requirements. It can be done rapidly with dictionaries and glossaries, or in some cases some vendors provide pre-built domain focused baselines MT engines e.g. automotive, financial, chemical, IT, legal. For very long-running and high-value cases/subject matter the need may arise for translation memory based customization, but the most common scenario in eDiscovery seems to be rapid customization. The availability of a range of domain glossaries and domain focused engines make higher quality MT output possibly with minimum effort. There seems to a market need for a web-based simple point-and-click interface for adding dictionary terms or translation memories (TMs), that can include integrated testing and deployment features, and also out-of-the-box domain-specific MT for a variety of domains as described above. Also, a typical flow may involve that limited customization is done on the bulk level but once a document set is culled, it makes sense to customize the MT system to improve MT output quality. MT output quality is an important determinant of selection, as we see from the user comment below. An effective customization process also helps to extract the most relevant set of documents for human translation efforts.
• Special Features: There are several things that MT vendors can do to help users get better output results, and some vendors provide ways to perform rapid customization with glossaries that are driven by n-gram analysis, use monolingual data to improve fluency and quickly incorporate available TM to tune the engine on the subject matter of interest. Other capabilities that also exist in MT solutions include:

• Some systems allow for anonymization and/or pseudonym-enabling of review data to enable and facilitate cross-border data transfers & reviews. This allows data sharing between work groups, while still complying with international data privacy laws and legal chain of custody requirements. 
• For advanced and more technical users there are also some vendors who provide toolkits to do corpus analysis and modification. This would allow users to add linguistically informed routines to enhance the data above and beyond what the eDiscovery platform can do.
• Audio & Video. The need to be able to handle digital “documents” now increasingly includes voicemails, conference call recordings and video.

While I am not suggesting that SYSTRAN is the only MT vendor who could service eDiscovery market MT needs, I am saying that they have solved several very specific problems that really matter to an eDiscovery user, and thus are likely to be a preferred vendor in many cases related to multilingual eDiscovery, in the same way that Relativity is for eDiscovery applications in general. In support Alvarez & Marsal comments:

“A key reason for using SYSTRAN was the depth of integration with Relativity, which means our clients see it is as one connected, flexible and effective solution – providing them with reassurance and comfort in only having to use one tool [Relativity]. In addition, the speed and accuracy of the translations were impressive when benchmarked against other providers, as well as the simplicity of accurately translating documents with a few mouse clicks.

The outlook for the future suggests that the eDiscovery will only gain momentum as corporate governance begins to monitor social media, and as we realize that email is increasingly understood to be a source of problems for information governance issues and compliance. Emerging regulations, especially in Europe, suggest the need will be even greater in the EU. Several eDiscovery service providers I talk to have suggested that multilingual documents are now increasingly common and this trend will only gain momentum in future. A closing comment from A & M:

“The need for accurate and efficient translations is definitely growing within the eDiscovery market… We are consulting more and more with clients whose data contains a mix of various languages and we do not see this need slowing down in the near future. “

Finding the Needle in the Digital Multilingual Haystack

There are some kinds of translation applications where MT just makes sense. Usually, this is because these applications have some combination of the following factors: 

• Very large volume of source content that could NOT be translated without MT
• Rapid turnaround requirement (days)
• Tolerance for lower quality translations at least in early stages of information review
• To enable triage requirements and help to identify highest priority content from a large mass of undifferentiated content
• Cost prohibitions (usually related to volume)

This is a guest post by Pete Afrasiabi, of iQwest Information Technologies that goes into some detail into the strategies employed to effectively MT in a business application area, that is sometimes called eDiscovery, (often litigation related), but in a broader sense could be any application where it is useful to sort through a large amount of multilingual content to find high-value content. In today's world, we are seeing a lot more litigation involving large volumes of multilingual documents, especially in cases that involve patent infringement and product liability. MT serves a very valuable purpose in these scenarios, namely, it enables some degree of information triage. When Apple sues Samsung for patent infringement, it is possible that tens of thousands of documents and emails are made available by Samsung (in Korean) for review by Apple attorneys. It is NOT POSSIBLE to translate them all through traditional means, so MT, or some other volume reduction process must be used to identify the documents that matter. Because these use-cases are often present in litigation, it is generally considered risky to use the public MT engines, and most prefer to work within a more controlled environment. I think this is an application area that the MT vendors could service much more effectively by working with expert users like the guest author more closely.

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Whether you manage your organization’s eDiscovery needs, are a litigator working with multi-national corporations or are a Compliance officer, you commonly work with multilingual document collections. If you are an executive that needs to know everything about your organization, you would have a triage strategy helping you get the right information ASAP. If the document count is over 50-100k you typically employ native speaking reviewers to perform a linear one by one review of documents or utilize various search mechanisms to help you in this endeavor or both. What you may find is that most documents being reviewed by these expensive reviewers is often irrelevant or requires an expert to review. If the population includes documents from 3 or more languages, then the task becomes even more difficult!

There is a better solution. A solution that if used wisely can benefit your organization, save time/money and a huge amount of head ache. I am proposing that in these document populations the first thing you need to do is eliminate non-relevant documents and if they are in a foreign language you need to see an accurate translation of the document. In this article, you will learn in detail how to improve the quality of these translations using machines at a cost of hundreds of times less than human translation and naturally much faster.

With the advent of new machine translation technologies comes the challenge of proving its efficacy in various industries. Historically MT has been looked at not only inferior but as something to avoid. Unfortunately, the stigma that comes with this technology is not necessarily far from the truth. Adding to that, the incorrect methods utilized in presenting its capabilities by various vendors has led to its demise in active use across most industries. The general feeling is “if we can human translate them, why should we use an inferior method” and that is true for the most part, except that human translation is very expensive, especially when the subject matter is more than a few hundred documents. So is there really a compromise? Is there a point where we can rely on MT to complement existing human translations?

The goal of this article is to look under the hood of these technologies and provide a defensible argument for how MT can be supercharged with human translations. Human being’s innate ability to analyze content provides an opportunity to help and aid some of these machine learning technologies. An attempt to transfer that human based analytical information into a training model for these technologies can provide translation results that are dramatically improved.

Machine Translation technologies are based on dictionaries, translation memories and some rules-based grammar that differs from one software solution to another. Although there are newer technologies that utilize statistical analysis and mathematical algorithms to construct these rules and have been available for the past several years, unfortunately, individuals that have the core competencies to utilize these technologies are few and far between. On top of that, these software solutions are not by themselves the whole solution and just a part of a larger process that entails understanding language translation and how to utilize various aspects of each language and features of each of the software solutions.

I have personally witnessed most if not all the various technologies utilized in MT and about 5 years ago, developed a methodology that has proven itself in real life situations as well. Here is a link to a case study on a regulatory matter that I worked on.

If followed correctly, these instructions can turn machine translated documents into documents with minimal post editing requirements and at a cost of hundreds of times less than human translation. They will also look more closely like their human translated counterparts with proper flow of sentence and grammatical accuracy, far beyond the raw machine translated documents. I have referred to this methodology as “Enhanced Machine Translation”, still not a human translation but much improved from where we have been till now.

Language Characteristics

To understand the nuances of language translation we first must standardize our understanding of the simplest components within most if not all languages. I have provided a summary of what this may look like below.

• Definition
  • Standard/Expanded Dictionaries
• Meaning
  • Dimensions of a words definition in Context
• Attributes
  • Stereotypical description of characteristics
• Relations
  • Between concepts, attributes and definitions
• Linguistics
  • Part of Speech / Grammar Rules
• Context
  • Common understanding based on existing document examples

Simply accepting that this base of understanding is common amongst most, if not all languages is important, since the model we will build on makes assumptions that these building blocks will provide a solid foundation for any solution that we propose.

Furthermore, familiarity with various classes of technologies available is also important, with a clear understanding of each technology solution’s pros and cons. I have included a basic summary below.

• Basic (Linear) rule based Tools
• Online Tools (Google, Microsoft, etc.)
• Statistical Tools
• Tools combining the best of both worlds of rules-based and statistical analysis

Linear Dictionaries & Translation Memories

Pros

• Ability to understand the form of word (noun, verb, etc.) in a dictionary
• One to one relationship between words/phrases in translation memories
• Fully customizable based on language

Cons

• Inability to formulate correct sentence structure
• Ambiguous results, often not understandable
• Usually, a waste of resources in most case use examples if relied on exclusively

Statistical Machine Translation

Pros

• Ability to understand co-occurrence of words and building an algorithm to use as reference
• Capable of comparing sentence structures based on examples given and further building on the algorithm
• Can be designed to be case-centric

Cons

• Words are not numbers
• No understanding of form of words
• Results could be similar to some concept searching tools that often fall off the cliff if relied on too much

 Now that we understand what is available, building a model and process that takes advantage of benefits of various technologies, while minimizing the disadvantages of them would be crucial. In order to enhance any and all of these solution’s capabilities, it is important to understand that machines and machine learning by itself cannot be the only mechanism we build our processes on. This is where human translations come into the picture. If there was some way to utilize the natural ability of human translators to analyze content and build out a foundation for our solutions, would we be able to improve on the resulting translations? The answer is a resounding yes!

BabelQwest : A combination of tools designed to assist in Enhancing Quality of MT

To understand how we would accomplish this, we need to review some of the machine based concept analysis terminologies first. In a nutshell, these definitions and solutions are what we have actually based our solutions on. I have made reference to some of the most important of these definitions below. I have also enhanced these definitions with how as linguists and technologists we will utilize them in building out the “Enhanced Machine Translation” (EMT for short) solutions.

• Classification: Gather a select representative set of the documents from the existing document corpus that represent the majority of subject matters to be analyzed
• Clustering: Build out documents selected in the classification stage to find similar documents that match the cluster definitions and algorithms of the representative documents
• Summarization: Select key sections of these documents as keywords, phrases, and summaries
• N-Grams: N-Grams are the basic co-occurrence of multiple words that are within any context. We will build these N-Grams from the summarization stage earlier and create a spreadsheet with each depicting each N-Gram and their raw machine translated counterparts. The spreadsheet is built into a voting worksheet that allows human translators to analyze each line and provide feedback as to the correct translations and even whether certain N-Grams captured should be part of the final training seed data or not. This seed data will fine tune the algorithms built out in the next stage down to the context level and with human input. A basic depiction of this spreadsheet is shown below.

Voting Mechanism				iQwest Information Technologies Sample Translation Native Reviewer Suggestion Table
YES	NO	SUGGESTED		Japanese	English
X				アナログ・デバイス	Analog Devices
X				デバイスの種類によりスティック品	Stick with the type of product devices
X				トレイ品として包装・	as the product packaging tray
	X			新たに納入仕様書	the new technical specifications
X		Common Parameters		共通仕様書	Common Specifications
	X			で新梱包方法を提出してもらうことになった	have had to submit to the new packing method

• Simultaneously human translate the source documents that generated these N-Grams. The human translation stage will build out a number of document pairs with the original content in the original language in one document and the human translated English version in another document. These will be imported into a statistical and analytical model to build the basic algorithms. By incorporating these human-translated documents into the statistical translation engine training, the engine will discover word co-occurrences and their relations to the sentences they appear in as well as discovering variations of terms as they appear in different sentences. They will be further fine-tuned with the results of the N-Gram extraction and translation performed by human translators.
• Define and/or extract key names and titles of key individuals. This stage is crucial and usually the simplest information to gather since most if not all parties involved already have references in email addresses, company org charts, etc. that can be gathered easily.
• Start training process of translation engines from the results of the steps above (multilevel and conditioned on volume and type of documents)
• Once a basic training model has been built we would test machine translate original representative documents and compare with their human translated counterparts. This stage can be accomplished with as little as less than one hundred documents to prove the efficacy of this process. This is why we refer to this stage as the “Pilot” stage.
• Repeat the same steps with a larger subset of documents to build a larger training model and to prove the overall process is fruitful and can be utilized to machine translate the entire document corpus. We refer to this stage as the “Proof of Concept” stage and it is the final stage. We would then start staging the entirety of the documents subject to this process in a “Batch Process” stage.

In summary, we are building a foundation based on human intellect and analytical abilities to perform the final translations. In using an analogy of a large building, the representative documents and their human translated counterparts (pairs) serve as the concrete foundation and steel beams, the N-Grams serve as the building blocks in between the steel beams and the key names and titles of individuals serve as the fascia of the building.

Naturally, we are not looking to replace human translation completely and in cases where certified human translations are necessary (Regulatory compliance, court submitted documents, etc.) we will still rely heavily on this aspect of the solution. Although the overall time and expense to complete a large-scale translation project is reduced by hundreds of times. The following chart depicts the ROI of a case on a time scale to help understand the impact such a process can have

  

This process has additional benefits as well. Imagine for a moment a document production with over 2 Million of Korean language documents that were produced over a long-time scale and from various locations across the world. Your organization has a choice of either reviewing every single document and classifying them into various categories utilizing native Korean native reviewers or utilize an Enhanced Machine Translation process to provide a larger contingent of English-speaking reviewers to search and eliminate non-relevant and classify the remainder of the documents.

One industry that this solution offers immense benefits is in the Electronic Discovery & Litigation support industry, where majority of attorneys that are experts in various fields are English-speaking attorneys and by utilizing these resources along with elaborate searching mechanisms (Boolean, Stemming, Concept Search, etc.) in English they can quickly reduce the population of documents. On the other hand, if the law firm relied only on native speaking human reviewers, a crew of 10 expert attorney reviewers, each reviewing 50 documents per hour (4000 documents per day on an 8-hour shift) would take them 500 working days to complete the review, with each charging hourly rates that can add up very quickly. 

We have constructed a chart from data over the past 15 years performing this type of work for some of the largest law firms around the world that shows the impact of a proper document reduction or classification strategy may have at every stage of their litigation. Please note the bars start from the bottom to top, with MT being the brown shaded area.

The difference is stark and if proper care is not given to implementation it often prevents organizations from knowing the content of documents within their control or supervision. This becomes a real issue with Compliance Officers that must rely on knowing every communication that occurs or has occurred within their organization at any given time.

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Mr. Pete Afrasiabi the President of iQwest, is a veteran of aggregating technology assisted business processes into organizations for almost 3 decades and in the litigation support industry for 18. He has been involved with projects involving MT (over 100 million documents processed), Manages Services and Ediscovery since the inception of the company as well as deployment of technology solutions (CRM, Email, Infrastructure, etc.) across large enterprises prior to that. He has a deep knowledge of business processes, project management and extensive experience working with C-Level executives.

Pete Afrasiabi
iQwest Information Technologies, Inc.

www.iqwestit.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/peteafrasiabi