Top 5 challenges facing corporate legal counsels: part 3—litigation

As you will have seen in my previous posts, public machined translation (MT) systems pose an enormous risk to the legal industry. We’ve explored how they can impact data protection – including GDPR – and why regulatory uncertainty makes it incredibly difficult to enforce. In part 3 of the series, we’ll look at how a lack of secure processes could impact a company’s reputation, and why litigation provides a real threat to business stability.

#3: Litigation

Whether it is inflicted piecemeal, causing death by a thousand cuts, or through one blockbuster bet-the-company suit, by slowly draining resources, hurting morale, and damaging the company’s reputation, litigation poses an existential threat to any business organization. Nearly six in 10 respondents indicated that their company was concerned about labor and employment litigation, far more than any other substantive litigation challenge. Moreover, when asked to identify their most significant substantive legal concern with regard to litigation, labor and employment disputes are at the top of the list. This is potentially significant insofar as it provides a glimpse of the current state of the employer-employee relationship. One might conclude that this dynamic is less collaborative and more adversarial, with the general counsel on the front lines.

Most legal practices and eDiscovery experts find processing large volumes of multilingual discovery documents impractical and even impossible. Highly secure, efficient and flexible translation solutions are increasingly important both to ensure eDiscovery confidentiality and to find relevant documents in multiple languages, all while controlling costs and improving efficiency. SDL’s multilingual eDiscovery solution connects SDL’s translation management system with the market leading eDiscovery technology platforms. Using this solution, legal professionals and internal investigators can understand, navigate and classify foreign language documents quickly.

In addition, the solution enables direct requests for SDL translation and language services directly from within eDiscovery technologies, or on behalf of their end clients, their representatives or third party eDiscovery providers. Additionally, through the use of AI/machine translation, fully automatic translation with almost real time turnaround of the initial paper discovery, eDiscovery and document reviews can be achieved. With over 2,100 accredited legal linguists and litigation experts, SDL can undertake large-scale projects that require dozens of specialized translators to work simultaneously for on time completion. For global firms SDL’s solutions are geofenced ensuring that data does not leave their jurisdiction. By using state of the art technology, data can be identified and reviewed quickly and efficiently which saves both time and cost.

To find out how SDL can support your localizations and linguistic strategy, please visit our legal pages, which will provide more insight on what we can do for you. Alternatively, if you are in Korea, visit us at the IBA Annual Conference Seoul 2019.

Keep an eye out for the next post in this series on how to address concerns around intellectual property.