From Information Governance to Governed Intelligence for Trustworthy AI

People

Companies

[00:00] AI isn't some magic wand, it is simply a echo chamber. If you have poor data, you're
[00:06] going to have extremely poor outcomes, firms are rushing to a doctor AI and discovering
[00:12] that data is not governed well. The data is over-retained, it's misclassified or it's
[00:17] completely under-governed. You can't really do AI well without good information governance
[00:22] first.
[00:23] That's where we're a car on this governance intelligence. Information governance used to be
[00:26] enough to thought within Lulfam's, it is front and center in today's world.
[00:30] With a foundation that makes AI trust worthy.
[00:41] All right, so today is global information governance day 2026. We have five identical
[00:50] questions, real answers on time to value,
[00:54] defensibility, integrations, and AI governance.
[00:58] So again, welcome to the InfoGov hot seat
[01:01] the show where information governance flips into governed
[01:04] intelligence and data becomes your AI advantage.
[01:08] So I'm Jim Marifield, them for this global information
[01:11] governance day special.
[01:13] I am joined by my co-host for today.
[01:15] Lee Zidwik Lee, thanks so much for being here.
[01:19] Thanks, Jim. I'm looking forward to the conversation and hearing more from our partners and what teams can actually implement this year.
[01:26] Yeah, absolutely. And of course, looking forward to having the conversation with you and the others. So let's bring our friend, our friend from the UK.
[01:33] Hi there. Here's our buddy. What's up, Chris?
[01:36] Hey, Chris.
[01:37] We're glad that you took time to join the Lea 9 in the hot sea. Of course, Chris Jowels, Lee, go RM, CEO, focusing on, you know, I comply.
[01:45] apply legal RM. I'm pretty sure like your title, I know you're the CEO, but you know what you're doing at legal RM and maybe even something personal, you know
[01:54] I know you travel that's or maybe something that's something fun you've been doing. Yeah, well first of all before I get started with that
[01:59] I want to say thank you to you, Jim and Andrew Leef of hosting this event and also
[02:04] the both arm and the Renealter, the backing of the communities in the getting together is what we
[02:09] in the information governance world absolutely need.
[02:12] Information governance used to be enough to thoughts within Northam
[02:15] especially.
[02:16] It is front and center in today's world.
[02:18] And it's largely thanks to people like you,
[02:21] who are to speak people for this and the commitment
[02:25] the backing of the communities.
[02:26] And we see that now with it, it will to call an and it
[02:30] armory in Focon and also it will to revolve
[02:33] whether there is a lot more focused on information
[02:35] governance as firms grow.
[02:36] So I just want to say that from the get go.
[02:38] And really just a, I'm going to give you an idea of how I got started in the IG.
[02:43] So it all started with the romance.
[02:45] I moved to Paris after my degree to go and see my girlfriend at the time.
[02:49] And couldn't find a job in an independent law firm looking after their records and their
[02:55] IT.
[02:56] Who would have known them on the supplier side and ended up working for laterally hummingbottle,
[03:02] the legal legal key product suite, which is conflicts, information barriers and records.
[03:06] In fact, it was mainly a physical records,
[03:08] but there was some integration with eye management
[03:11] and also with DMV, which was the hummingbird pot,
[03:15] and by the way, I started Leicler M.
[03:17] Well, it was basically I saw that their firms
[03:19] were drowning in unmanaged records,
[03:21] and both physical and electronic,
[03:22] and there was a need to bring together a one single platform.
[03:27] Initially, we weren't doing that.
[03:29] We were providing consultancy to get the help people
[03:31] get the most out of those older products.
[03:33] Before we realized that there was nothing on the market,
[03:36] So we worked with a couple of products, a product called FileTrack, a product called Legal Key,
[03:41] and we did some IRM work even, and then we saw, well, these aren't good enough for the industry,
[03:47] and so we developed from the grain-dup or grain products, which we launched in 2019.
[03:51] So yeah, that's a bit of a background on me in how we ended up here.
[03:55] Yeah, you've been around ever since, you know, and that's great.
[03:59] So let me ask you, let's get started here.
[04:02] So, what do you wish every organization did before they call it an IG program?
[04:09] I would say, I would say, probably know what you have.
[04:14] Where it is, who's responsible for it?
[04:17] Because with that visibility, everything is just guesswork.
[04:20] But I also agree with what Nick's comment earlier about not selecting perfection.
[04:25] Be the enemy of the good.
[04:27] You can't, any other thing to say really is you can't really do, and this is a theme I think I want to, we're, I'll pre-repeat multiple times.
[04:34] You can't really do AI well without good information governance first, with a foundation that makes AI trustworthy.
[04:41] So, which is why we've become more mainstream and more important to firms, because we touch on the business rather than on the risk of education aspects.
[04:50] I mean, you cheated up so nicely.
[04:51] That's why we're calling this from here
[04:53] and now governed intelligence, you know, governed intelligence.
[04:57] It's IG flipped, right?
[04:58] So, great. You cheated that up nicely.
[05:00] Yeah.
[05:01] So, so Chris, with all the things going on,
[05:04] what would you say are the top three capabilities
[05:08] you're prioritizing in 2020, six?
[05:11] I know you're getting a lot of information
[05:13] from your customers, from the industry.
[05:16] And what specific customer problems
[05:18] are driving those investments.
[05:20] So before I touch on that, I'm just to say we employed a chief AI officer back in November
[05:27] ourselves, ourselves because of to look at both our products, sweet and adopting AI.
[05:33] I think we've certainly other providers have talked about that already, but we see it is
[05:37] central not only to our products, sweet and where it's going, going forward, but also in terms
[05:42] of our business.
[05:43] So I think there was the last, I think it might have been Tony mentioned about how AI is permissive in its
[05:50] police if it's everywhere. And some firms have connecting with their share point, their one drive.
[05:55] In our business, we have AI connected to our supports solution, our CRM, our SharePoint,
[06:04] my emails, teams, so everything is interconnected. So if I need to know what's going on with the client,
[06:09] I can see it as long as I have permissions to see it with a no systems. It's very important.
[06:14] So with that said, really, um, the our thing is looking at AI ready,
[06:17] data foundations. I don't think it's just a solution from us.
[06:21] It is a, um, Aaron touched on it about eye management there, AI classification to better classify,
[06:29] or bring into the eye management work world content with an emails under a under a client matter structure.
[06:35] I also think that there's people like Net Docks with their AI classifier or to classifier,
[06:40] which will go through the whole library or cabinets and pull out additional metadata sources.
[06:46] So there's those, but also I think firms are rushing to a dot-ta-i and discovering that data is not
[06:53] governed well within unstructured data sources. Many of the data's over- retained, it's misclassified,
[07:00] or it's completely on the governed, and that is where it becomes not only a liability to the
[07:05] firm, but also a liability where any AI, AI isn't some magic wand that is simply a echo
[07:11] chain boron amplifier of good solutions, but also poor. So if you have poor data, you're going to
[07:18] have extremely poor outcomes when it comes to using AI tools it in my view. Well, we want to invest
[07:24] in making AI compliant a platform that ensures a data is clean, classified, and policy
[07:30] It's a very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple.
[07:34] And so, we're going to see what we're going to do.
[07:37] So, we're going to see what we're going to do.
[07:40] So, we're going to see what we're going to do.
[07:43] So, we're going to see what we're going to do.
[07:46] So, we're going to see what we're going to do.
[07:48] So, we're going to see what we're going to do.
[07:51] So, we're going to see what we're going to do.
[07:53] So, we're going to see what we're going to do.
[07:56] So, we're going to see what we're going to do.
[07:59] the terminology wasn't quite said. Firms will move to an IG framework rather than an IG team,
[08:06] or an IG, or tools which might have one or two things when they procure new tools, they
[08:11] will ensure that it meets the framework for a governance platform.
[08:16] I was talking about.
[08:17] As number one, sorry, I'll go quickly in the other ones. Next one's accelerated event
[08:21] available disposal. The biggest pain point we hear from firms are they they know they're over
[08:28] retaining. There's a huge amount of information, but if you could boil that down and say,
[08:33] if one partner and one client approves, you get one approval, you can clear down 150,000 documents
[08:40] in 20 boxes. You're going to get more bang for your buck. So looking and delivering the
[08:46] absolute obvious. So the business benefit is delivered to the B2, the IG teams and not buried in
[08:54] some reports. So that's the second part where we're looking at really like getting rid of that.
[08:59] Parvalid. The other thing is looking at deeper across platform governance. So we are looking at
[09:05] launching. So what currently we have integrations and we're going to come to this a bit further in the
[09:10] the conversation. We have integrations with iMenage work with net documents and the different
[09:15] flavors of iMenage, a single-tensity on Prima and cloud. Although I think nobody's really touched
[09:20] upon. I heard that the last speaker say about it's just API's it's just API's. No one talks about
[09:26] the weaponization of APIs, the throttling of APIs, even if you the law firm's own access to
[09:34] those APIs and subject to acceptable use it's really important that you will dual power to ensure
[09:41] that you have access to do the work you need to do. Anyway just to say I manage net stock
[09:47] events office 365 so we have integrations with one drive and share point. File shares where they
[09:52] be a dual AWS Windows based and of course physical records but we're also going to be deepening
[09:57] our integrations with us.
[10:00] the repositories.
[10:01] And that's going to also take two-prong attacks.
[10:03] This may our next release is going to have
[10:05] multiple integration points.
[10:07] But we also have the ability to provide ad hoc integrations.
[10:11] So sometimes there is no business benefits
[10:13] in building a new integration piece where you have,
[10:16] you just need a reminder.
[10:18] And you want holistic policy engine
[10:20] allowing you to have a governance framework.
[10:22] Instead of spending a lot of money and time,
[10:24] building an integration piece,
[10:25] you may just want a pointer with a necessary metadata
[10:29] understanding to ensure that in 10 years time when you want to destroy that content,
[10:33] your your your reminded and you know exactly where it is.
[10:35] I've been saying, you got a lot of capabilities there, Chris.
[10:38] You know, so let's let us ask you, you know, what is a successful 90 days look like in your
[10:44] platform. I'm going to I'm going to almost say the fifth amendment start with and I'll come and give you an answer.
[10:50] So it depends heavily on the the firm very heavily and that will be based on the
[10:56] on the quality of their information and the classification that you're walking into.
[10:59] If you're going to have to do a clean-up job and a huge amount of mapping,
[11:02] it's going to be a lot slower and you're going to deliver a lot less value within
[11:06] those 90 days. It's also based on the size of the firm and oftentimes the
[11:11] type of work they do or the number of mergers combinations that they've done over a period of time.
[11:17] Because if the data is poor, it's going to be challenging. My view is number one, it's going to
[11:23] of invisibility within that 90 day period, you want visibility on the information assets across
[11:28] the different repositories that you're connecting to, whether that's a migration of a
[11:32] physical records and or a net doc's eye managed or a share point and physical records that
[11:38] you have that visibility there. It's the policy application ensuring that they've got visibility
[11:45] and they understand what their policies are and they are set the application those policies.
[11:50] So you can see whether you can identify whether or not it's in our policy engine is extremely powerful.
[11:56] So it will be a firm wide policy.
[11:59] It can be at
[12:01] Practice group level, department or practice group level.
[12:04] It can be at client level, matter level, sub matter or thorough attorney level.
[12:08] It can be at file type or document type level.
[12:12] It can be at matter type level or a combination of all of those things.
[12:17] So it can be granular down to the individual document level and it can be subjects who are number of approvals.
[12:23] Messing that policy into the visibility of the content and then looking at the first disposition.
[12:31] So of course it's a reduction of rot.
[12:33] I know in the planning for this, you want to give a concrete kind of outcome, an idea.
[12:39] And I'm not going to name the firm, but it's on our website.
[12:43] One of the firm, a firm in Europe, they put our system in within six months.
[12:48] They had saved a hundred thousand dollars in physical records destruction from the implementation.
[12:56] So they were, but I will caveat that by saying, they also changed off site storage vendor at the time.
[13:02] So they were able to make those destruction and not pay ridiculous fees or be beholden to the,
[13:08] the offset storage vendor, any saying we're doing 50 boxes a week or whatever.
[13:12] The other thing I would say is a typical project where we're only doing electronic records.
[13:17] It is the removal of the overage charges with the offset, some of the DMS vendors charge,
[13:24] which can be significant in nature. What is the return investment is looking at? If you're paying
[13:30] If you're paying $50,000 in overage charges or $150,000, you can bet your boss in dollar that those overage charges are related to a redundant
[13:41] obsolete or trivia data. If you've got rid of that, you'll be able to remove it. Those overage charges. So it's cost savings. Yeah.
[13:48] So, so, sure to let there are a couple of things that I wanted to kind of extrapolate and follow up on.
[13:54] It's a disability, policy, policy enforcement, all of those obviously key components of any governance initiative.
[14:02] So how do you prove in an order to dispute that the policies that affirm establishes are complied consistently and what evidence do you produce that details that in a law to report approval trails,
[14:18] exception handling things like that. How do you handle the audit process and be able to report
[14:25] back on what those activities were? All of the above, which you would have seen, those have
[14:31] seen our systems, which know that you can report on every selection. Every action is locked within
[14:36] the system, retention policies are applied. We gather, we look at who's approved, which assets,
[14:43] When I say assets, I mean, and it down to the granular individual information asset, the particular
[14:48] documents or the particular physical record and there are noted.
[14:52] So the evidence it can be produced, the policy application log, which policy was applied to
[14:58] which asset when the rule was triggered was that Matt Closure last bill dates creation dates.
[15:04] If it's at company level, practice group level, client level, matter level, practice group, whatever,
[15:08] there's there's so many different options.
[15:10] then looking at the approvals you may have different approvals based on different policies or different
[15:15] areas of law. So again they can be sequential or they can be all at the same time,
[15:22] who's approved and when and which vast bit batch of assets that relates to looking exception handling.
[15:29] So when there's a legal whole, if there's a partner override or we're pending, pending destruction,
[15:37] but we've got the approval but it's pending for whatever reason because there's
[15:41] one extra level of approval and we can even produce this disposition
[15:46] certificates within the application as well. But the application in itself is
[15:51] is the proof because it's completely audited and I know that one of your questions you were
[15:57] alluding to it here was so how long do you keep how long are you going to keep this pre-fall?
[16:02] So whilst we can instruct the deletion of records within iManage or within net documents or within share points or within one driver or a file share or even we can integrate with the offsite storage vendors to send a request for Pum instruction it's iNMainTN or access the user where iHospital tool called to Recall or many of the others use iSonic Order O'Neill we can send through via web service bridge or sfTP request for destruction.
[16:31] Those assets will be destroyed, but we will keep the audit of what was there when what policy was applied,
[16:39] who approved and when it was destroyed. Just a little side note, when we put destruction,
[16:45] because there's nervousness sometimes, when you go into an eye manager and a net-dochative
[16:49] environment of nervousness about, oh my god, they might destroy everything, we don't do hard
[16:55] how hard deletions we do, soft deletions so it goes into a recycling cube so that you as a firm
[17:01] continue to manage and control what is actually permanent destroyed and usually those recycling
[17:07] bins stayed in after a 20 to 28 days cycle so that's kind of important. So a lot of information.
[17:12] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we need those reports. So we can see what actually what actually happened
[17:20] for numerous reasons. So thanks for sharing that Chris. Can I just say we also
[17:25] allow you to apply costs associated with cost or savings,
[17:30] associated with every action within the application.
[17:32] Not many of our clients use that, I find it enough, but it's there and you can go down to the
[17:36] the point, I don't know, five below a cent of a dollar. So five zeros after a cent of a dollar.
[17:42] So you can actually calculate how much your savings are. So IG isn't seen as a cost centre, but
[17:47] a profit centre. I like that, sure. Yeah. So Chris, we talked a little bit about it.
[17:53] you know, the outset, when you're first joined about repositories,
[17:57] vibration tools, you know, that your platform covers, you know, such as DMS,
[18:02] email, 360 file shares. Where are you seeing any gaps?
[18:06] Can you see in like, you know, chat for instance, is that is that still a gap, you know,
[18:12] in systems or with classifications and things?
[18:15] I think that the firms, we haven't seen anything, anything, anything we do,
[18:21] So we haven't had any gaps in what we do because of where firms are on catch up to where our product is at.
[18:27] So most firms are looking at either their DMS first and then their physical records or physical records and DMS,
[18:35] then they go into SharePoint and we have some firms where there is a half and half split where they're using a DMS vendor on half of their firm
[18:43] in half a using SharePoint. And in that case, we managed both the physical other,
[18:48] so the content in their SharePoint and content in the DMS. And for that individual firm, I'm
[18:53] thinking, although they don't even use physical records, then it uses for that. So but currently,
[18:59] we have addressed the areas where there is proper classification or strong classification. And
[19:05] that has been the, as I mentioned before, physical records, the content in a structured DMS,
[19:11] structure file shares wherever they're based these file shares. One drive sharepoint.
[19:17] There are we have connectors where we're putting in place for where there is not so much a
[19:23] risk profile but more of a cost benefit. Things like a high queue, Titan file,
[19:29] Bock, where there's a true return investment if you can reduce down the content over here.
[19:35] I see a need for more and more and more connectors or at the same time restructuring or looking at tools.
[19:45] Tony mentioned about active nav is one tool which looks for dark data within unstructured data sources.
[19:52] There are other tools. I think that is a growth error where firms will want to look at those massive terabytes all.
[20:00] but even of data within unstructured fellowships and unstructured emails.
[20:04] And I think we are part of the solution on that.
[20:07] They all get there, the areas where there are gaps in my view today.
[20:11] That can be dealt with with using the ad hoc data sources I mentioned within our application.
[20:17] The incentive to time, I know, have cut a lot of ground, we're getting close to the top of the hour.
[20:23] But Chris, can I ask you one final takeaway?
[20:26] So in one sentence, what should listeners do in the next 30 days to improve IG outcomes?
[20:34] I think it's like most of the other people have said, which is really what in what I said at the
[20:39] beginning, don't let the good be the enemy of the perfection of the enemy of good.
[20:43] Talks about this a lot about looking at picking most overdue disposition lists or a particular
[20:48] client, large client, or whether there's one particular attorney or partner, get it approved,
[20:52] get it destroyed because of good news, bad news travels fast, but good news travels fast as well.
[20:57] Look for champions and celebrates success. People like to be part of success and if you celebrate
[21:04] it will proliferate around the firm and across the firm and it's very important.
[21:09] Thank you. Yeah, I agree with you. Chris, thanks for joining us today.
[21:13] I mean, this was fun. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Thank you very much for everything you do.
[21:17] Yeah, absolutely. Right, Chris. Thanks so much. Thanks, Chris. Thank you. Bye bye.