Tesla and Edison were two of the biggest innovators in the 20th century who happened to have very different views on the same subject. Kind of like many legal departments, some of whom put the utmost importance on law firm relationships while others lean more toward law firm efficiencies. In this session, we’ll explore the benefits and downsides of these two views with a debate from corporate legal clients on different ends of the vendor management spectrum.

Today’s legal operations professionals have more responsibility for driving business value than ever before. This requires a critical review of current processes, and identifying opportunities for improved outcomes and workflow management. In this session you’ll hear about the current pain points and “spend leakage” in managing outside counsel spend, and learn how AI and other advanced technologies can enhance your e-billing solutions for greater visibility and cost management.

The contract lifecycle is bookended by processes that, if not carefully managed, carry the potential to introduce financial and legal risk in any organization. Compounding the stress is the reality of ever-increasing workloads, without an equally expanding staff.

In this session, we’ll explore efficiencies and risk mitigation delivered to contract management via clause libraries and obligation management practices. Together, these CLM technology features hold the keys to accomplishing more work with fewer hours, while maintaining stronger levels of organizational compliance.

Digital transformation is changing our lives. Social media, digital collaboration, and online business transactions make life easier and richer. Individuals readily share information about their interests, purchasing habits, connections, health, finances, and more. All this information represents a potential gold mine for the business world.

But this transformation comes with increased risks—to businesses in the form of compliance requirements and to individuals in the form of privacy concerns. Jurisdictions around the world are enacting privacy and data protection regulations to protect individuals from those seeking to take advantage of this rapidly evolving data environment.

To respond to these challenges, organizations need a proactive information governance framework broad enough to cover the needs of global privacy requirements, yet flexible enough to support their needs in different stages of business maturity and it requires analytics at its core.

With analytics, data becomes a rich store of business value. With analytics, data enables deep insight through enrichments that reduce risk. With analytics, private information is more readily identified enabling an organization to act quickly to ensure it is protected.

Joining analytics to proactive information governance enables organizations to reduce risk and adhere to current & future privacy regulations.

Join Micro Focus and our panel of experts to learn how proactive information governance can be leveraged to:

• Identify and protect personal data
• Provide better service to customers
• Mitigate risk across multiple threat lines
• Derive greater business value from predictive analytics

Recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning have bolstered the predictive power of data analytics. The most advanced systems can now predict legal outcomes with 90% accuracy. Consequently, lawyers are now using these data-backed prediction tools to make more accurate and less biased decisions. Soon, these tools will be commonplace. 

Key Takeaways

• The evolution of legal research tools and where we are today
• An overview of how data-backed prediction platforms are helping lawyers work more efficiently, ensure consistency of research and advice, and access the same legal insights as their private firm and public body counterparts
• A glimpse at the most advanced software in action

Join us as we bring some of the brightest legal experts and tech gurus together for a discussion on eDiscovery trends of the new decade.

We'll ask:

• What do we want to hang on to into the 20's and what do we want to leave behind?
• What challenges and opportunities do we anticipate?
• How will next-gen technologies and laws reshape legal teams and how they operate?

Digital transformation has led to an explosion of data that grows exponentially every day and empowered employees, more easily creating, storing, and sharing information across devices, resulting in a complex digital environment that poses new risks. Adding to that complexity are new regulations and standards that are constantly emerging and evolving.  The unfortunate reality is that there are also news headlines every day talking about the risks companies face—whether from internal or external sources. These risks include hacking, insiders leaking data whether maliciously or inadvertently, security breaches, etc.

At Microsoft, we face these same challenges, which is why we’re investing in compliance and risk management to help ourselves and our customers to more easily safeguard privacy, address regulations and standards, and mitigate insider risks. In this session we will share new capabilities in Microsoft 365 that use machine learning and intelligence to help address  provide customers with the ability manage their compliance posture and mitigate risk.

Key Takeaways:

• Know and protect your data – the first essential steps towards compliance and defensibility in the cloud
• what is your and what is your cloud provider liability when it comes to data protection and compliance
• Intelligent tools can help your organization to remediate critical insider threats and risks, while maintaining a principled approach to privacy
• Processing data requests completely in place, across your Office 365 environment including chat content,  you handle e-discovery in a more secure and defensive manner
• Technology also provides possibilities of continuous risk assessment and monitoring, offering proactive instead of reactive approach to compliance

This session will explore the fundamental shift taking place today brought about by changing the way companies communicate and collaborate. Use of mobile devices and tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom are causing a dramatic reduction in the use of email, and forever changing the face of eDiscovery. This session will explore how firms can adjust their discovery processes to address this new reality.

Image processing, powered by deep learning technology, has made great advances in the last decade and is now effective at providing accurate results for challenging machine learning tasks including image classification, image clustering, and object detection. Deep learning is the same technology that the AlphaGo program used to beat the 18-time world Go champion Lee Sedol, a feat that some machine learning scientists described as a ‘spooky result’.  Deep learning is an incredibly powerful technology which can help lawyers more effectively identify and analyze images within their reviews. 

Image classification, image clustering, and object detection are helping lawyers mine their data sets for handwriting, personal photos to assist with privacy regulations, the state of a construction site before and after a major event, pornography, and many other applications.  These technologies are also helping to exclude irrelevant logos and pictures from review to reduce costs, as well as organizing similar types of pictures together for a
quick assessment of their content.

This session will:

• Describe what deep learning technology is and how it works
• Examine the use cases where deep learning can provide significant benefit to lawyers
• Demonstrate how the technology is applied in a legal document review

One of the key differences separating the most highly profitable law firms from all the rest is their underlying technology. Join Shafat Qazi, CEO & Founder of BQE Software to learn about the latest technology tools and trends available to law firms that increase profits and reduce overhead.

In this session you will:

• Learn how to optimize and automate your billing process and improve cash flow
• Learn about new and trending tools that will help your firm rapidly grow
• Learn why cloud computing is the key to thriving in the coming decades

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) came into effect on Jan. 1, 2020, but many companies are still struggling to understand the sweeping new privacy law, its impact on the business, and how to manage compliance across a matrix of global privacy laws. In
this session, we’ll outline what this new law means for your business and lay out a 5- step guide to demonstrating on-going compliance the CCPA. We’ll also share findings from research conducted with the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) on how ready (or not) businesses are for the CCPA, what factors are driving compliance and how the GDPR fits into CCPA readiness.

• Breakdown the requirements and importance of CCPA for privacy and security teams
• Outline how to comply with the CCPA, including:  do not sell, right to request and right to delete personal information
• Learn how to build a privacy program that addresses the overarching requirements of various global data protection laws
• Takeaway a step-by-step guide for demonstrating compliance with the CCPA

No matter where you look, the world is growing increasingly complex. Whether it’s climate change, foreign election interference, global financial crises, healthcare delivery systems, or the cockpit of a modern jetliner, the complexity is accelerating. For legal teams, it’s magnified — terabytes of ediscovery, millions of documents to review and produce, and armies of attorneys involved in litigation. As teams expand, communications silos are created and inhibit successful outcomes. 

Law is inherently collaborative, and good collaborative practices are necessary to manage the complexity of today’s legal challenges. It’s essential to create a
collaborative environment that champions insight, discovery, and criticism. As MIT professor Michael Schrage argues, “Successful collaborators don’t just work with each other; they work together through a shared space.” 

Join Everlaw CEO AJ Shankar; Jeremiah Weasenforth, Managing Project Attorney at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe; and Sue Muncey, Complex Litigation Manager at Berger Kahn in a joint presentation on the value and methods of good collaboration.

• Learn how client revenue increases with collaboration among practice groups
• Understand how good technology can create a shared space in which the entire litigation team is connected to the evidence
• Discover how firms can establish and optimize teams for better outcomes

From the GDPR to the CCPA to China’s State Secrets Act, law firms and corporations are increasingly confronted with irreconcilable priorities when managing data flows in litigations and investigations. Comprehensive U.S. discovery obligations often conflict with data privacy laws and blocking statutes. The intersection of these conflicting legal regimes results in expensive motion practice, delays in discovery and potential breaches of law.  Fortunately, advances in technology and intelligent e-discovery workflows can significantly mitigate these pain points.  This CLE session, presented by experienced global privacy and e-discovery attorneys and technologists, will discuss how to design processes and leverage technology to remain compliant and secure while meeting the needs of the case.

During this session we will spend time walking through the broad data and regulatory landscape and what products and solution does Microsoft bring to market. We will further dive into the partners that we work with daily to support our customers with information protection, and risk management.

Key Take-Aways:

• Learn about how a Compliance Workshop can help understand your data risks
• Review what products provide advanced compliance capabilities
• Hear from the Partners that can help deliver a compliance workshop and help drive solutions that will support advanced compliance

Microsoft’s Legal Affairs group in Corporate, External and Legal Affairs (CELA) is committed to applying industry leading innovation to digitally transform and modernize our department’s practices and ways of working. We will be investing in our people and culture to produce innovation, enable skills, and increase adoption through tech intensity.  Using compelling storytelling of digital transformation, we intend to share our learnings, technological advancements, and cultural change with members throughout our global legal ecosystem.  Please join us for this session and the journey ahead.

• Hear more about our mission to use our technology to drive an organization-scale journey built upon transformative and cultural change.
• Learn how we will invest in our people culture, processes, and tools that accelerate digital transformation progress.
• See how Microsoft solutions can empower our people with scale, velocity, and insights, which we will share with our customers.

For better or for worse, emojis are now an established part of human interaction,including professional (and unprofessional) communications. Emojis are being used more and more in corporate email and chat systems and the sentiments represented by these symbols can present significant business risks – and finding them can be a challenge. What can companies do to adapt to the emoji explosion? 

This emerging technology session will take participants through basic emoji meanings, hidden and otherwise, discuss newly-available technology helping target risky communications containing emojis and charged words, outline how lawyers can quickly investigate the substance of the issues at hand, and explain how courts have addressed emojis to date.