InfoGov Hot Seat: Global Information Governance Day 2026

Executive Summary

This episode explores practical information governance priorities for 2026, including defensible disposal, retention, auditability, integrations, and AI governance. Nick Burge of Luterra discusses why organizations should approach defensible disposal incrementally rather than treating compliance as an all-or-nothing effort. The conversation also covers large-scale content transfers, physical records disposition, Microsoft 365 integrations, audit evidence, and gaps in chat and collaboration environments. The episode concludes by examining emerging questions around AI governance, including the retention and ownership of prompts and outputs.

Welcome to the InfoGov Hot Seat

Jim: All right, so today is Global Information Governance Day 2026. We have five identical questions, real answers, on time to value, defensibility, integrations, and AI governance.

So again, welcome to the InfoGov Hot Seat, the show where information governance flips into governed intelligence and data becomes your AI advantage.

So I’m Jim Merrifield, here for this Global Information Governance Day special. I am joined by my co-host for today, Lee Zidwick. Lee, thanks so much for being here.

Lee: Thanks, Jim. Looking forward to the conversation and hearing more from our partners and what teams can actually implement this year.

Jim: Yeah, absolutely. And of course, looking forward to having the conversation with you and our other guest, who is going to be Nick Burge from Luterra.

How are you doing, Nick?

Nick: Hey, Jim. How’s it going? Thanks for joining us today.

Jim: Nick Burge from Luterra, of course, focusing on FileTrail, where that platform—

Before we get into all the questions, I want to ensure we understand your title and what you actually do at Luterra.

Nick: Yeah, Nick Burge, senior product manager here at Luterra, focused on FileTrail and PowerDesktop applications here. It’s been a year since the acquisition that we joined back in 2024.

Jim: Awesome. Great to have you on the hot seat.

What Organizations Get Wrong About Defensible Disposal

Jim: In one sentence, Nick, tell us what most organizations get wrong about defensible disposal.

Nick: Yeah, I think the first thing that really comes to my mind is that they really think that it’s all or nothing—that you have to do it all at one time, or otherwise you can’t be compliant.

There isn’t really any room for starting small. There’s tons of precedence that says you can act in good faith and move towards compliance, and I find that trying to target easy wins and start building the framework for actually doing that is where most people get it wrong.

I think it’s really critical to focus on where you can actually make the biggest impact and look at the little angle, and demonstrate some of those movements towards compliance.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong

Jim: So what’s the cost of getting it wrong?

Nick: Yeah, I mean, it’s buying adoption.

You only have so many chances, I think, to socialize initiatives, especially when you’re talking about disposition, where the sensitivity and the risk are really high.

You can have all the bells and whistles of a really strong platform. You can have a really detailed and documented record retention schedule. But as far as getting the stakeholders and winning that sentiment, it’s something that you only have so many attempts at.

Having large shotgun approaches, which can backfire, or having poorly executed plans where you’re not socializing some of these initiatives, can really lead to credibility erosion. Restarting those initiatives is just even that much harder.

Information Governance Capabilities for 2026

Jim: So, Nick, what are the top three IG capabilities you’re prioritizing in 2026? And what specific customer problems are driving those investments? What are you hearing customers want? Where are we focusing?

Nick: Yeah, you know, disposition and retention has always been a focus that we’ve really done a really good job excelling in. I think where we’re seeing a lot of growth and need is in the amount of mobility and transfers and movements between firm to firm.

It’s not so much one attorney or two attorneys; it’s large-scale content moving between organizations. I think some of the workflow that comes with that is something that we’re speaking to or working to speak to.

Having some of the initial tools in place to execute on that is one thing, but having a means to really make it intuitive and performative is the next half of it. That’s where we’re wanting to spend some of our top focus this year.

We’ll have a lot to announce there as we start to roll out those incremental improvements.

I think we’ll also, fundamentally, being under the Luterra umbrella, expand this to be able to have more access into some of the other collaborative platforms that the organization offers. It makes sense to be able to expand some of our governance capabilities there.

That’s another area that we’re really trying to lean into and focus on. We have lots of governance-focused utilities, so having a cohesive offering is something that we’re really excited about trying to provide.

I think this year we’re going to have a lot to be able to speak to and show for that.

The last one—I never like to leave some of the physical stuff behind because I think it’s still something that’s so important. In close to what we do, we’ve really seen a huge spike in users being able to use our tools for physical records disposition. That’s actually growing more than we’ve ever really seen it.

One of the things we’d like to start working on is providing insights into a whole-box disposition. Really get keen insight, like, “This entire box is ready to go.” Believe it or not, the work it takes to be able to surface that isn’t actually as easy as it really seems.

Some of the approaches that firms use to get to that vary, and so we want to be able to respond to that. That’s something we’re all focusing on as well.

Not to mention, lastly, Microsoft 365. I think integration with a lot of the different components of that is definitely where we’re headed, kind of speaking to what Lee was talking about: meeting attorneys where they work. That’s something that we’re really echoing loudly and focusing on.

Jim: I can’t leave that physical stuff behind.

Lee: No, no.

Jim: It’s all there.

Lee: It’s all there.

Jim: Yeah, exactly.

Lee: And it’s still being generated too. It’s not stopping either.

Jim: No, for sure.

The First 90 Days

Jim: So here’s a question for a typical legal or regulated enterprise: What does a successful first 90 days look like in your platform?

Nick: Yeah. I think before, we were really focused on giving visibility and having some fundamental records management and traditional workflows. But now that we’ve been able to really build out some of our disposition and retention capabilities, the first 90 days are—

We’re actually going in having customers execute destructions at large scale now. We’re actually doing production destruction in pilot phases now too.

So, really, the first 90 days are having customers carry forward disposition in ways that we really haven’t seen before, both physically and electronically.

Lee: It’s good to hear.

Auditability and Evidence

Lee: So here’s a question: I’m like auditing, right? Everybody—you have to produce—everybody’s either in and out or they’ve got to produce an audit report and things like that.

What evidence can you produce, such as logs, reports, approvals, exceptions, and those things, in your platform?

Nick: Yeah, we have a really powerful audit utility that tracks every event in the system.

One of the areas that we really try to surface is not just how activity is done against one record to another, but really, how are we applying retention, and how are we weighing and scaling that from item to item?

We have a really complex matrix of how we apply those retention rules. Not only can we surface how they’re applied in the system, but our user documentation also parallels and surfaces that to you, so that you can be confident and know not only are you applying retention—whether it be practice-driven or from outside counsel guidelines—you have factors that are playing in from your client rules or your matter-based rules.

They may even have media-type rules within a certain matter or a certain client, where a certain type of document has to be retained within a specific amount of time.

We want to be able to surface that. If you have overriding retention policies, we’ll show how those have been changed and why they changed, what it was before, what it is now, who made the change, and whether it was automated or not.

Then we make that something that’s downloadable and accessible.

Jim: That’s excellent, especially where most organizations have to maintain an ISO certification or a SOC 2. Those logs are really important. So, for the security folks, it’s great that you have those features.

Repositories and Collaboration Tools

Jim: So let’s talk about—I know you mentioned Microsoft 365—but which repositories and collaboration tools do you cover best today? DMS, email, 365 Teams, file shares, all those things?

Nick: Yeah, for sure. Right now, obviously, NetDocuments and the various flavors of their offering, for on-premises or cloud. We integrate with file shares as well.

We can provide regex strings to scrape the client-matter data out of the pathways so that we can execute disposition and provide some searchability there too.

From a physical standpoint, we can also collaborate and integrate with Iron Mountain and access off-site storage, so that you can have requests fulfilled and workflow from that as well.

This last year, we published all of our APIs in REST format, which expanded some of our integration points into other management tools and capabilities, and even Office Services applications, if you wanted to do more ticketing-based fulfillment and requests as well.

It really allows some of the keys to be put into the hands of the firms to determine how they want to best leverage some of those endpoints and integrate as well.

Gaps in Chat and Collaboration

Lee: You see a lot of this. Where do you still see gaps around chat and collaboration from your perspective? And what do teams do in the meantime? I think a lot of us are trying to figure a lot of this out.

Nick: Yeah, I think the gaps really vary wildly from organization to organization.

Historically, it kind of depended on systematic management of some of those environments being well-provisioned and well-structured. You fire up Teams for the first time and people kind of just go wild. You might have a collaborative chat with just one or two colleagues versus the content being managed in, say, a structured team.

I think that still is going to be pervasive and still exists. I think the gaps are going to be best answered by AI. Can that help augment some of that information and surface some of that knowledge of where information truly lies?

I think that’s a nice way into the next question.

Lee: Go ahead.

Nick: Well, I think what we do in the meantime is difficult. We’re still trying to figure that out. Some of the solutions and some of these AI utilities that we’re hoping to adopt and integrate are going to help inform how we can best manage that going forward.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to—

Lee: No, it’s an important topic, which is why I wanted to have another question.

Trusted AI Use and Governance Controls

Lee: What specific controls do you provide to enable trusted AI use—data minimization, permissioning, proven sensitivity labeling, retention, AI inputs and outputs, and all that other fun stuff?

Anything to prevent AI from amplifying IG issues, such as over-retention or misclassification? What are you looking at there?

Nick: Yeah, this is an active development. It’s something that we’re highly focused on this year and looking to be able to do some workshops and demonstrations later on.

What we’re really focused on is building that foundation of human-driven controls, which help build a strong foundation in how we use the existing applications.

We are going to be focusing on incorporating AI into these tools, which is really going to be augmenting and not replacing those human-driven mechanisms.

We want to make sure that we’re building it on top of a governance-first architecture, not the other way around.

We want to be able to view more of whether there is PII or PHI. Maybe there are confidence thresholds that users can interact with and help steer and guide and train the models over the content, so that we’re working with the content and not necessarily having it work for us.

Again, this is something that’s very much in flight that we’re looking at. We don’t have anything in place now, but it’s something that we hope to be able to surface pretty soon.

Jim: We appreciate that honesty too, Nick. That goes a long way.

Retaining Prompts and Outputs

Jim: Talking about prompts, I think every firm and company is trying to figure out: Do we retain prompts or outputs? What’s your take?

You don’t even have to talk specifically to—

Nick: No, this is the only question where I had to go out and do research, Jim, so I’m going to be able to give an answer.

But actually, there’s a lot to it because you’ve got geopolitical considerations, both from Europe and the U.S., and from state to state. That’s not even considering what the different sector-specific requirements are, let alone what the tools that exist even allow for that type of interaction.

I think a lot of these tools were built without even the consideration of governance in the first place: What prompts? How do you keep prompts? What models are you using? What are we bringing in?

I want to answer that with just “yes,” but I do think that for now, I mean, there’s PII risks. In some of those tools, you’re asking personal questions. You might think it’s work-related, but it’s still coming from a person.

There are considerations that are going to have to be addressed, and it’s going to take some time to fully grasp and get our hands around that.

I think those are going to be really good resources in the coming year, as more information is published and education gets proliferated across the discipline.

I think it’s going to be very much a collaborative effort for everybody to learn and share what makes sense. There are probably going to be some learning lessons along the way too.

I think there are just some things we’re not even anticipating that could potentially come into play from a governance standpoint.

Jim: Yeah, I tend to agree with you. I think we’re all kind of figuring out together. I think that’s the beauty of the practitioners, the law firms, the business partners, and even consultants. I think we’re all kind of working together on this stuff, trying to improve products and figure it out.

If there’s one area where I do want to introduce a lot of guesswork right now, it’s here, right? There’s already enough of that going on with the black box of this.

Lee: Yeah. I think from a practical standpoint, real quick, as teams are deciding whether to retain prompts or outputs, you want to understand why. What’s the purpose?

Are we seeing some client requests to retain prompts in some instances? So that’s a business case.

You may have other efficiency gains or whatever, and then it comes out of that classic IG thing of the risk versus the benefit in doing that evaluation.

Jim: Right.

Lee: That’s not the only thing, I agree. The big question is going to be, at least on the law firm side, when a lateral partner leaves or comes in, are they going to take their prompts with them? Or is it the firm’s?

We don’t have to answer that, but it’s definitely a question that I think firms are asking: Who owns the prompt? Is it the firm? Is it the person? Is it the client?

Jim: Right. It’s interesting because we’ve gotten some tools—we’ve gotten to play with Researcher and Copilot—and some of these more advanced tools that I’ve never really had a chance to see before, where they’re searching the internet against your email, against your OneDrive, against other people’s content that might actually have other team members’ content shared in a SharePoint site.

You’re getting insights both internally and externally in a way that we really haven’t seen before,

Meeting People Where They Work

The idea of meeting people where they work.

And I think that's becoming more and more everywhere.

The one source of truth is becoming—I hate to say it—but it's almost everywhere at this point.

Yeah, it is.

Practical Next Steps for Improving IG Outcomes

So, Nate, we talked about a lot here, but here's the final question for you: in one sentence, what should listeners do in the next 30 days to improve IG outcomes?

Yeah, I'm really pragmatic. I like to be practical, and I think, you know, start small.

I think piloting is really important, whatever the initiative is. I love to be able to pilot retention and work through that: who are we communicating to, who are the stakeholders, and what are some of the gotchas that we might have considered?

What do we want our emails to look like when we send out notifications? What do we want the language to feel like?

So I think starting some of that foundational work, if you haven't done that yet, is what my recommendation would be, for sure.

Closing

Well, Nick, thanks for joining us today. You shared a lot of great information. We appreciate you being on with us.

Likewise, it was fun. Appreciate it.

Yeah, it was awesome.

Thanks.

Thanks to you and the terrorist.

Thank you.

Thanks, everyone.

Bye.

Thank you.