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The Three Rs for Your In-House Team: Reduce, Reduce, Reduce

Dylan Salisbury

In-house teams have faced enormous pressure over the last two years—new ways of working, exposure to a host of rising risks, and growing demand for legal, investigation, and compliance services. They have adapted, they’ve overcome, and yet they are still feeling growing pressure to deliver more with the same or even fewer resources. With resources already stretched thin, that is simply not tenable for many teams—that is, not without an ace in the hole.

These modern problems require a modern solution, and not having the tools to keep up puts your organization at risk in this new landscape. In-house teams must find ways to reduce the burden.

Reduce resource uncertainty

Arm yourself with the real-time reporting tools and dashboards that will empower your team to up your project management game. This will give your project management capabilities a real shot in the arm to be able to monitor workloads, determine scope, allocate resources, identify bottlenecks or sticking points, and recognize when to call in help.

Not only can this lead to greater cost certainty, but it can also help you capture and report on the metrics of all the wonderful ways in which you are managing growing volumes of matters, increasing efficiency, and keeping costs under control—all while maintaining quality to keep your organization safe and secure. 

Knowing what kind of beast you need to tackle at the outset is half the battle. Tools like early case assessment can give you a quick and accurate understanding of the scale and scope of a matter. Armed with this knowledge, you’ll be able to respond appropriately.

Reduce time

For many departments, maintaining relationships with outside providers, be it partners or outside counsel, accounts for substantial time expenditures. It is imperative that you are getting the most out of this time. By improving communication channels and collaboration practices with your outside partners or other departments you can substantially cut down on time to value.

A great way to do this is by keeping your data in a centralized platform that is familiar to all from which you can all collaborate. This eliminates the time suck of duplicating data, transferring data, and jumping between a collection of disjointed and functionally dissimilar platforms. 

Data volumes and the rate of work have reached a point where it is becoming impossible to manage it all without advanced tools like automated workflows and AI assistance. Powerful and easy-to-use tools like email threading, entity extraction, automated privilege identification, and sentiment analysis can dramatically streamline data volumes and pinpoint just what you’re looking for.

Reduce risk

The last thing your organization needs is a wrench in the gears in the form of a data breach, cyberattack, or regulatory violation.

Elevate your team’s value proposition by proactively addressing risk management. Of course, there needs to be a balance between proactive mitigation work and reactive risk management and remediation, but avoiding breaches or compliance violations and tightening cybersecurity will make for smooth sailing. 

A few ways to address proactive risk management include:

Find ways to reduce instances of data transfer. Every time data needs to move it creates a new copy, opening your team up to the risk of human error, data loss, or even a breach. Utilize a solution that centralizes your data.

Trust the pros. The threat landscape is always changing, becoming more complicated and sophisticated. Dedicated security experts live for this stuff and love to stay on top of this changing threat landscape, but it’s more than a full-time job itself. Given the rising stakes and growing threats, it’s becoming necessary to leverage a team of outside security experts who are immersed in this world and find a solution that automatically applies updates to stay ahead of the latest threats.

Stay limber, stay flexible. The ability to adapt workflows with changing regulation can be a huge boon for your team’s ability to stay out of compliance uncertainty while retaining efficiency. Seek out solutions that are flexible enough to adapt and provide dedicated customer success to help ensure that your organization’s unique regulatory concerns are being met. 

Ready to improve your investigation process?

Dylan Salisbury is a product marketing manager at Relativity, where he specializes in understanding and serving the corporate community.

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