Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019.  Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Experts at FTI Technology

FTI Technology Shares 2019 Predictions for Global Business

Worldwide, the business climate is changing at a rapid pace, as data protection regulations begin to be enforced and introduced across multi-national jurisdictions and the universe of digital data continues to explode. These developments impact businesses on many fronts, including legal (contract management, electronic discovery), compliance (data privacy and regulatory guidelines), IT (blockchain adoption, analytics use) and more. 

Experts at FTI Technology, across these critical business areas, have compiled a number of predictions for 2019. Their thoughts on how the global climate will change and new impacts to businesses are below.

GDPR may be used to influence ongoing legal matters

"Data protection authorities now have much more power and oversight to investigate and correct issues relating to data privacy than ever before. We're likely to see an increase in whistleblowing activity that is aimed at using GDPR violation to influence other legal matters, such as employment litigation, union negotiations, etc." - Nina Bryant, Director, FTI Technology

"Any organization that is involved in an ongoing dispute may find that opposing parties now have more incentive to notify authorities of potential non-compliance or GDPR infringement, to damage the organization's reputation or otherwise weaken its position." - Brendan Gilbert, Director, FTI Technology

AI becomes business as usual

"Automation and AI will become further standardized as part of corporate managed services and as this happens, most companies will begin to consider programs or entire departments dedicated to the implementation and control of such as standard/business as usual." - Ryan Drimalla, Managing Director, FTI Technology

Analytics solutions will provide greater discovery flexibility

"Research analytics adoption will drive upstream collection and enrichment process improvements, making the data acquisition process able to provide faster access to insight. Further, analytics solutions will provide greater flexibility for incorporating data from text, chat, collaboration platforms and other short form messaging systems. We'll see reduced focus on from which platform data originated (e.g., Slack, Bloomberg Chat, SMS, Facebook Messenger, etc.), and more on dynamic functionality for grouping, searching and analyzing cross-channel communication by the common elements of date, correspondents and content. Lastly, cloud data platforms will continue to expand access to data through APIs. Data interchange standards will provide greater opportunities for the creation of integrated discovery and compliance solutions." - Tim Anderson, Managing Director, FTI Technology

Blockchain will continue to raise questions

"In 2019, people will still be talking about blockchain and still won't understand what it is." - Tim Anderson, Managing Director, FTI Technology

"As an increasing number of enterprises look to adopt blockchain for applications spanning parts and supply tracking, data storage, cybersecurity, verifying devices, enabling secure communications and more, in-house legal teams must prepare for the data governance and compliance implications of its use. The primary concern from an IG perspective is that blockchain technology will inherently create an explosion in corporate data with no retention schedule. Counsel that begin thinking about it today will be in a much better position to build sustainable programs around blockchain data; and potentially even learn ways to leverage the technology to strengthen compliance and governance efforts." - Saffa Sleet, Director, FTI Technology

Regulators will cooperate for GDPR enforcement

"Early enforcement actions we've seen under GDPR have involved several regulatory bodies, all working together with the data protection authority to investigate claims and bring enforcement on multiple fronts." - Brendan Gilbert, Director, FTI Technology

"It's very likely that this will happen more in future actions, particularly in industries like healthcare, pharma and financial services where regulators are already extremely active. We expect to see increasing cooperation between multiple regulators, federal agencies and EU data protection authorities to investigate and enforce data privacy principles." - Nina Bryant, FTI Technology

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