With data at the forefront of many modern lives, understanding how to properly manage, store and process it is vital in litigation. However, when legal professionals are tasked with dealing with huge volumes of data — known as big data — this can present problems.
So, what are the legal challenges of big data? And are there tools available to overcome these issues? Let’s find out.
- What is big data?
- Challenge #1: Data security
- Challenge #2: Consumer privacy
- Challenge #3: Volume of data
- Challenge #4: Review process
- Challenge #5: Variety of data
What is big data?
Big data refers to large volumes of hard-to-manage data that’s too complex to be dealt with by traditional processing methods. How you deal with big data depends on the following characteristics:
- Volume - The size of data determines how valuable it is and whether it should be classed as big data
- Variety - Data can be structured or unstructured and originate from several channels. Think emails, photos, videos, audio, etc
- Velocity - The speed of data generation. How fast is new data being generated and how can you process this to meet your needs?
So, what importance does big data play in legal proceedings? Like most things in the modern world, data can greatly influence litigation processes.
In law, utilising big data with advanced analytics tools can speed up the justice process, present new evidence and streamline document processing. However, dealing with big data isn’t simple. Let’s look at some of the challenges legal professionals face when dealing with big data.
Challenge #1: Data security
Big data naturally brings more risk of security and privacy issues. With more scrutiny placed on data protection, legal professionals and IT leaders must consider privacy, confidentiality and data management more than ever.
Larger volumes of data also bring a higher threat of a data breach. With such high concentrations of data stored together, legal organisations must prioritise mitigating cyber-risk as these data sets may become targets for hackers. Security breaches can be incredibly costly for businesses, so effective data security is essential.
