Having worked in India at an LPO for nearly 6 months now, I have seen the use of technology in almost every aspect of legal work. I have been lucky enough to be part of a team which embraces and pushes technology to continually improve efficiency. Recently this technology push has started to expand into areas where I did not have much prior experience. Specifically, we have had the opportunity over the past several months to apply what we have learned to data breach reviews.

I think that everyone can agree that data breaches are becoming a large part of the legal conversation over the past several years. And with large data breaches often comes increasingly stringent requirements for notification to those individuals affected. Because of this, there is a growing sector of the legal review industry that is dedicated to reviewing this information. Before working at an LPO I had no idea this field was as large as it is. I also did not realize the opportunities for technological applications that this type of work would present.

From the data breach reviews we have ran at LO2 I personally feel that the use of technology is just as important, if not more important, than technology applications in traditional document review. Part of the importance of technology in data breach comes from the nature of the information which is being reviewed. For example, most sensitive information follows a similar pattern. Social security numbers are always the same amount of numbers arranged in a similar pattern; bank accounts also follow a specific arrangement. This consistency has allowed us to structure searches in the documents which are able to more quickly identify those documents which have potentially sensitive information easily.

The uniformity of the information being searched for also allows us to build in more complex search strings and patterns which may not always be available when searching for more nuanced text. Even the structure of names allows for more targeted searches as they follow similar patterns. One other tool we have utilized is batching similar document types. Not only is it helpful to batch documents by their format, but also using document names allows for us to easily spot important documents which contain PII or PHI and then review an entire group at once. In my opinion noticing similarities in documents and then having attorneys review them in clusters is one of the best ways to improve efficiency as they learn the documents and can understand where to search others that are similar.