Client information governance requests: how the landscape has changed

Introduction

The Law Firm Information Governance Symposium (LFIGS) wrote our seminal white paper on Outside Counsel Guidelines (OCGs) in 2014 and has since added to it with entries in 2016 and 2018. Client guidelines may come in the form of OCGs, engagement letters or client agreements and, collectively, are referred to as Client Information Governance Requirements (CIGRs). Our papers discuss the opportunities for law firms provided by CIGRs and how Information Governance (IG) professionals can help promote various initiatives by focusing on the topics that clients care about. In addition, we’ve included a myriad of practical and specific assistance, such as best approaches for setting up CIGR intake procedures, some typical client technology requirements, and ways to better partner with your General Counsel. Chances are, if you have a specific question related to CIGRs, we’ve covered it before or it’s addressed in this paper.

The goal of this paper is to dive into some topics in more detail while also exploring some new topics that have become increasingly important. Where in past papers we briefly touched upon Firm priorities and initiatives that can be furthered with CIGRs as featured considerations, in this paper we delve further into how you can leverage client mandates in a big way. We also get into some best practices by giving anecdotal evidence on what’s been working, what hasn’t, and what we plan to try next.

The last three years have brought a lot of changes to the information landscape and with that comes meaningful changes to the mandates issued by our clients. To that end, we take a look at the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) guidelines and how best to develop a standard approach. We also explore the new normal of remote work and how clients are changing their requirements to account for this new way of working.

Download the whitepaper to look at how to leverage client requirements to drive our own Information Governance initiatives.