Most people in our industry know Nuix has powerful and scalable tools for solving eDiscovery, investigation, information governance, and other problems. What some may not know if that most of this technology can be run remotely, meaning work can continue and people can stay busy and safe all at the same time. Explore with us some of the scenarios and solutions we have at hand to keep the lights on while we navigate through a global pandemic.
Several remote workforce scenarios exist today using Nuix. Some of these use cases exist because of the COVID-19 pandemic, while others were in place well before. Some of these scenarios and solutions include:
- The eDiscovery meat/data grinder. The process must keep moving forward; litigants will demand it.
- Forensic investigation. Collect remotely and safely in a repeatable fashion.
- Insolvency, bankruptcy, and accounting. Who is owed, by whom? How much is left? What contracts are valid or invalid? How will you sort out the mess? The hospitality and retail industries, along with others, have been hit hard. Fair distribution of assets and wealth is required considering the situation.
- Fraud. During recovery, it’s an unfortunate reality that investigations into misappropriation of funds from the federal government will be necessary. The old adage “follow the money” holds true here; there’s a lot of money involved, hence a proportionate amount of fraud.
REAL SITUATIONS IN A CHANGED WORLD
We continue to hear about incredible applications of our software from customers faced with significant challenges.
Getting Ahead Of Insolvency And Bankruptcy
One large global customer had over 12 TB of data already collected and placed into the Nuix Discover® SaaS environment as they started to sort through insolvency materials. These materials will allow the firm to properly assign asset ownership and distribution for companies that have unfortunately had to shut down a result of COVID-19.
It will take years of discovery work to properly dispose of assets for thousands of companies affected by the pandemic. Using Nuix Discover in the cloud, the firm can start ranking assets and creditors using the software’s analytics capabilities and continuous active learning (CAL).
Field Work Using A Mobile Forensic Lab
It’s not uncommon for a mobile forensic lab to be “wheeled in” to a location to collect data for a forensic investigation. It is possible however to use the Nuix Portable Collector to make forensically sound images. It’s ideal especially for larger data quantities that can’t be reliably collected over the network in a timely manner and have them shipped to a static forensic lab. Just as clean rooms are often used for forensic investigations, you can adapt similar procedures allowing forensic examiners to ensure their safety while processing and investigation commence via the cloud or the web-based review and analytics interfaces.
Virtual Settlement Conferences
We have a partner that’s processing data centrally and distributing it using Nuix Investigate® to help its clients facilitate virtual legal settlement conferences.
To begin, unstructured data is being downloaded from networked drives at the rate of around 200 GB a day in batches. This data is sometimes custodian-based and sometimes based on matter or data type.
The partner then processes the data with Nuix Workstation and presents it online via a secure login to Nuix Investigate. The end customers—in this case, law firms—can then run various searches; tag, annotate, and redact; and then inform the partner that the data is ready for production. At this point, the partner produces a load file in Nuix Workstation and uploads it to a network drive securely via virtual private network.
Most litigation is settled outside of a courtroom. This fact, and the current environment, lends itself to a virtual remote working process. Many parties are likely to take the attitude of “Let’s just settle quickly rather than take our chances waiting for courts to reopen.”
The recent trend of law firms moving to e-signatures for official documents specifically to meet the needs of this unusual time further pressures the legal services community and legal software companies to ensure a safe and uninterrupted workflow.
Centralization Of Data
Because Nuix tools allow you to work via the web creating a data lake, serving many stakeholders (Legal/Compliance/Risk/Governance/Investigation) makes a ton of sense. Even the inverse sounds better and transparent to users—leave the data where it is, process it where it lives, and form a virtual data lake and manage the data via the web using Nuix Investigate and the functionality to promote data to Nuix Discover to keep the party going.
AN ECOSYSTEM OF VIRTUAL OPTIONS
Nuix Solutions Consultants can architect the solution suitable for all aspects of working from home. If you can describe what you want to do, we can design a safe and productive home office workflow using our existing suite of software.
Running Nuix Workstation In The Cloud? Yes You Can!
A little-known fact, Nuix Workstation and Nuix Investigate both run well in Azure, Google Cloud, or AWS virtual environments. Using the Aspera utility for uploading data quickly to the SaaS environment of your choice, it’s easy to process and enrich data, getting it ready for review and analytics quickly. You can use the same licenses you already have and install the products on cloud-based servers anywhere in the world while pulling licenses for servers in traditionally architected locations behind the firewall or in the cloud for no additional cost.
Nuix Discover SaaS
Nuix Discover SaaS has been available for years, putting linear review, advanced analytics, and so much more at legal teams’ fingertips. With a long, storied tradition of cloud support and continuous performance updates, look no further for your eDiscovery review needs.
Nuix Investigate
The Nuix investigate user and group permissioning allows for incredibly granular separation of duties. Not only can you set up users within groups to have unique logins and access to only specific cases, you can even set specific permissions to operate within a given case. Restrictions to downloading, redacting, printing, and other operations exist for each user and group.
You can also change or elevate permissions at any time as well as changing or deleting logins for temporary users to further ensuring chain of custody. Separation of responsibility is now more important than ever since we can’t easily physically audit data or even the process used to produce it. Being able to demonstrate that a series of people were involved in the virtual chain of custody is increasingly important.
Licensing In The Cloud
Nuix’s Cloud Licensing Server allows high speed expansion to processing capability with no risk and makes burst licensing for when the big jobs land in your lap a reality.
Because Nuix Workstation and Nuix Investigate are now licensed by the Cloud Licensing Server, licenses are distributed via AWS instead of a physical license dongle, removing one more physical obstacle and, incidentally, keeping staff safe. As I mentioned above, if a matter increases in size, we can distribute “burst” licenses for specific timeframes to meet the challenge of unexpected or uncommonly large data sets.
With expectations that litigation will rise steadily in the coming months due to COVID recovery efforts, burst licensing could come in very handy.
Collect From Anywhere
With Nuix Enterprise Collection Center you can push the two flavors of Nuix agents to endpoints easily, drastically expanding your network collection capabilities. You can create collections for forensic as well as eDiscovery use cases and pull the data over the network.
Great news! It’s already sanitized—no hand sanitizer needed! The data (and devices housing it) never need to physically change hands. All this work collecting, processing, and reviewing the data can be “done from home” and work can continue with a highly defensible chain of custody built in.
MORE FLEXIBILITY WITH EVERY RELEASE
We didn’t start down the path toward flexibility through some prescient expectation of a global pandemic. Products like Nuix Discover and Nuix Investigate, along with our cloud licensing and endpoint software, just happen to meet the needs of a distributed workforce.
Let’s face it; modern organizations demand more options and employ more remote workers today than ever in history. I don’t have a statistic for that, but just look around and you can see it for yourself. While this pandemic will pass and many of you will go back to work in an office in the hopefully near future, the need still exists for options in your enterprise software solutions.
Until then, stay safe, and know that we continue to work to make our software more flexible and more useful to answer your biggest and most difficult data challenges.
Source: https://www.nuix.com/blog/empowering-flexible-workforce
Recent Comments