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In times of crisis, criminal activity — particularly crimes involving theft and fraud — tend to spike. There is no reason to believe that the COVID-19 pandemic and the unrest in the financial markets will be any different. An important difference for company counsel, however, will be in how the malfeasance, negligence or wrongdoing can be investigated.
The usual methods for conducting a meaningful and thorough investigation need to change quickly. In-person document collection and review as well as face-to-face interviews are out, and questions and challenges have arisen for counsel. For example, without in-person witness interviews, how can defense counsel truly assess the merits of any whistleblower report or a witness's credibility? How can documents be shown to a witness sitting in a different country if borders are closed and flights are cancelled? Even if the law firm has a local office in the country in question, what if that country is in lockdown? How can documents be transmitted across international borders to U.S. counsel needing to defend the company before the DOJ or the SEC without violating local privacy laws? How can a company ensure enforcement of a document hold during an internal investigation and parallel government inquiry when its employees are all working from home? And with counsel accessing a company's data remotely and increases in Internet crimes, such as phishing, how can the security of that data be maximized?
|COVID-19 and extended remote-work arrangements present new issues around implementing legal holds and preserving documents subject to government inquiries. More employees work from home, bring documents home, print documents at home, and electronically store documents at home or on non-business computers, devices or systems. Those home-based documents will be outside of any automatic document hold that can be applied by a company's IT department, and manual holds, especially of physical documents, require individual employees' cooperation. Accordingly, companies should:
|Travel restrictions challenge the typical collection process. Sophisticated companies may be able to handle collecting electronic documents in-house with direct transmission to a vendor to process and load into a review platform. With technology personnel working from home, companies will need to consider the following:
|COVID-19 travel restrictions raise important considerations for counsel around digitizing physical documents, the wisdom and availability of cross-border document transfer, and the mechanism used for cross-border transfers — from both legal permissibility and cybersecurity risk perspectives.
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What Law Firms Need to Know Before Trusting AI Systems with Confidential Information In a profession where confidentiality is paramount, failing to address AI security concerns could have disastrous consequences. It is vital that law firms and those in related industries ask the right questions about AI security to protect their clients and their reputation.
GenAI's ability to produce highly sophisticated and convincing content at a fraction of the previous cost has raised fears that it could amplify misinformation. The dissemination of fake audio, images and text could reshape how voters perceive candidates and parties. Businesses, too, face challenges in managing their reputations and navigating this new terrain of manipulated content.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, some tenants were able to negotiate termination agreements with their landlords. But even though a landlord may agree to terminate a lease to regain control of a defaulting tenant's space without costly and lengthy litigation, typically a defaulting tenant that otherwise has no contractual right to terminate its lease will be in a much weaker bargaining position with respect to the conditions for termination.
As the relationship between in-house and outside counsel continues to evolve, lawyers must continue to foster a client-first mindset, offer business-focused solutions, and embrace technology that helps deliver work faster and more efficiently.
The International Trade Commission is empowered to block the importation into the United States of products that infringe U.S. intellectual property rights, In the past, the ITC generally instituted investigations without questioning the importation allegations in the complaint, however in several recent cases, the ITC declined to institute an investigation as to certain proposed respondents due to inadequate pleading of importation.