Joy Heath Rush
 40:18

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, cloud, privacy, data, technology, happening, law firm, computer, office, digital, organization, belongs, day, legal, debbie, working, big, person, job, call

SPEAKERS

Debbie Reynolds, Joy Heath Rush

 

Disclaimer  00:00

Personal views and opinions expressed by our podcast guests are their own and are not legal advice or official statements by their organizations.

 

Debbie Reynolds  00:13

Hello, my name is Debbie Reynolds. This is "The Data Diva" Talks Privacy podcast, where I discuss Data Privacy issues with industry leaders around the world with information that businesses need to know now. Today I always say I have a special guest, but this is super true this time. So I have Joy Heath Rush on the show. She is the CEO of the International Legal Technology Association, which is called ILTA. Let's see, let me think back to how we met. I don't know how we met met. But you and I ended up at the same firm. You were working with the firm. I was doing consulting for the firm when they were trying to do digital transformation with legal documents. That was a long, long time ago. And I have been so thrilled to see all the progress that you made in your career, I think from the moment that I met you, you know, some people are just born leaders, and you're just one of those people. So I feel like you are just unflappable like nothing. I have to say I would like to throw you a loop. If I told you, you know, aliens landed down the hall, you're like, okay, we're gonna do this.

 

Joy Heath Rush  01:40

I would say, what are the next steps? And I feel the same way about you. By the way, it's, it's great to be able to watch someone's career that you admire so much. And you say, God, it's great when you see capable people advance and advance and do cooler and cooler things. That's just. It gives you faith in the world.

 

Debbie Reynolds  02:02

Oh, it does. Absolutely. So I've been, you know, I had the pleasure of attending ILTA in 2019. And I attended that. You know that the kickoff session that they had in a big, you know, the big conference room or the big. I don't know what they call it was gigantic. 

 

Joy Heath Rush  02:21

Auditorium.

 

Debbie Reynolds  02:22

Yes, there were over 3000 people in that room. And I could not have been more proud because I felt like, you know, the woman I met many years ago is on the stage. I mean, you've always been that person.

 

Joy Heath Rush  02:36

Well, thank you. I mean, as I said, we have a great mutual admiration society. And you know, you say I'm a special guest. I feel like I'm on I'm with the special person doing the special podcast, so all y'all listening out there you just if you think it's sappy, you just gonna have to get over it. Because you know, when people admire each other, that's what happens.

 

Debbie Reynolds  02:56

Yeah, I would love to talk just a little bit about your career journey. So you've had very interesting jobs. I feel like all of them fit you kind of before the time. And I think a lot of people in their career do very similar things. You know what I mean by even though they go to a different company, they do similar things. And I don't feel like you ever did that. So tell me a little bit about your career.

 

Joy Heath Rush  03:22

That's a great comment. And I'll tell you when I left Sidley Austin, and after 28 years, someone said to me, how did it feel about leaving suddenly, after being in the same job for 28 years, I said, what in the world led you to believe I was in the same job 28 years, I was probably in 21 different jobs during that 28 years, and some of them at the same time. Well, I studied kind of an unlikely. I have an unusual degree. It's a BS FS, which is a Bachelor of Science and Foreign Service from Georgetown. I intended to go into the State Department and be a career Foreign Service officer. And the last thing I wanted to do is touch a computer. I was the most computer-phobic person that ever was on the planet. And sometimes life doesn't turn out that that didn't turn out to be the right choice for me. And I took a job right after college where I was working in the office, you know, since 1981. And we had word processing equipment, you know, no one had computers in 1981. And not many. It was word processing equipment. And my boss kept wanting me to go to training, and I did everything I could. The dog ate my homework. Man, I did everything I could to get out of doing that. And I was sure I was gonna get fired. Because I was so computer-phobic or so technology-phobic. So I went to my first class, and I call back to the office at lunchtime, and I was like, this is the greatest thing. I love this. And I've been in technology ever since. And that company, it wasn't the law firm per se, but it was one of these places kind of like Regis is now where there were a bunch of people renting spaces, mostly lawyers. So I was working on legal documents all the time I fell in love with them. I fell in love with the practice of law. I fell in love with technology. I learned a ton that I went to Sidley Austin, and as a word processing manager, and the very first personal computer in the entire firm was in my department in Washington. And, you know, when I used to get yelled at by the head of wordprocessing in Chicago, it's like you're trying to put us out of jobs. I'm like, don't you get it? This thing is the future. Right? You got to learn this stuff in order for us to have a future. And, you know, it's interesting yet, you know, I know my dear friend, Judy Flournoy, I know you know, there are several of us kind of, in our generation, so to speak, she has a theory that a lot of us got into technology as women because we could type. Yes, in the early days of technology, it was all keyboard, everything. It was all text. And then it kind of went from there. And I married, you know, technology, doing things fast with what I knew about the practice and the relationships with the lawyers. And I got to do more and more interesting things. And the thing I miss the most about not being in a law firm is lawyers. I'm, you know, they're, they're motivated and smart and have high standards. And I like the pace at which they work. And then I went from doing all kinds of different things in my law practice, including litigation support in the days when we did bait stamping by hand, you and I talked about that at breakfast one day, we did, yes you'd see timesheets, with lawyers spending 12 hours a day, you know, five days a week bait stamping documents by hand. But, you know, following what was happening in that area, and then getting into applications and multimedia, then I went to work for a provider of legal technology, where I was able to take a lot of skills, I learned about working with lawyers, as well as technology to selling technology. And then I got my job at ILTA two and a half years ago, which I feel like every thread in my entire career, kind of woven together. To this point, you know, if I had been an ILTA volunteer, I had been an  ILTA sponsor, I had been working with lawyers and technology for more than 30 years. And I have a tremendous passion for the nonprofit world and for the mission of the organization. So that was a really long answer to a really short question. But I will tell my professors back at Georgetown, if there any of them that haven't retired, you didn't waste your time. I use my diplomacy skills a lot in my job.

 

Debbie Reynolds  07:49

And you have to. You're a diplomat for sure because you're dealing with people with different backgrounds and different experiences and trying to get them to work together.

 

Joy Heath Rush  07:58

And people with different agendas. Right, that's, that's a big part of it.

 

Debbie Reynolds  08:03

I know you have on your profile, which is only then you say, a lover of people, that's totally perfect. I think that's a good description of you. Because if, you know, I feel like you're just a natural leader. So you know, how to take, you know, whatever skill someone has, and be able to put it to get use. And, you know, I think it's, I think one of the hardest things you could ever do is run like a large volunteer-based organization, right? Because you have, you're asking people to do things that they're not actually getting paid for. Right? Some people?

 

Joy Heath Rush  08:39

No, that's exactly right. I mean, people will ask me how big my organization is, like, how many people you know, in our quote, unquote, workforce? I said, Well, it kind of depends on how you count. You know, they're not quite 30 of us on the staff, but there are hundreds, hundreds of volunteers. And what's so fantastic is you see these people who have really tough day jobs study. I mean, it's not like these people are sitting back and eating bonbons in their day job, they have very demanding day jobs, yet they give huge amounts of time and energy and love to the organization and said something about my profile, saying lover of people, you know, I say everybody has a superpower, and everybody has super skills, my superpowers, I just love. I mean, I have a lot of that. And it's amazing what you can accomplish with it. And I think that's one reason I connect with the volunteers because they have such huge love for the organization. And one of the things that's amazing about my staff is that they have a volunteer spirit, you know, and that's fantastic.

 

Debbie Reynolds  09:44

Yeah, right. We are. So we are very similar in that. In that regard. I taught myself computers. I was not formally trained. I started out in multimedia. I do all my own marketing stuff because I started doing that. Yes, I've taught myself to use computers. So very similar in that regard. I think, you know, when we think about legal, to me, privacy is sort of wound in there somewhere. So before it was kind of like an abstract, or maybe a long sheet of paper about stuff, do you have to do those kinds of oh, yeah, yeah, we have to think about privacy, especially, we are working with cases of our work on companies, they have data, you know, all-around around the world, it was always kind of a feature in, you know, a thread in legal technology. And now it says all the regulations are coming about are becoming more stringent in terms of fines and things like that. I've been surprised about it becoming kind of its own industry, in and of itself. What are your thoughts about that?

 

Joy Heath Rush  10:50

You know, that's a great question. And, and I will say, I always love to take problems back to what I call kind of first principles. So his privacy is something that we didn't even think about when we were all paper, right? Because people spent enormous amounts of time filing paper, putting the paper in really secure places, you know, locked in, and locked rooms, locked in locked file drawers, you know, you had all kinds of instructions about not reading your documents on the train and stuff where people can see them. And nobody made that connection right away when we started having things that were digital. And so you go back in, and you and you say, oh, I still have to protect data. Oh, okay. But now it's a different kind of data. The problem you're trying to solve is keeping client confidentiality. And it's funny because I was on a panel recently at Penn State University Law School. And we were talking to three L's about the difference between the technology they use at school and the technology they'll use at a law firm. And you know, this is really interesting, because these are digital natives.

 

Debbie Reynolds  12:05

Right?

 

Joy Heath Rush  12:06

These kids have always had the internet and cell phones. They don't remember anything else. If you drew, if you distill it down, the big difference is that the data that they use on their computers on their phones today belongs to them. Once they get into practice, almost none of it belongs to them. Right. And that's the shift we need to make. And that's, I think, what we need to reinforce, for people to say click oh, privacy, of course, this data doesn't belong to me. I'm a custodian.

 

Debbie Reynolds  12:40

That's right, absolutely hit the nail on the head. I like to tell people, you know, when you have someone else's data, you are a steward of that data. It doesn't belong to you, even though you can touch it, right? You can do different things with it, but maybe you shouldn't be doing those things.

 

Joy Heath Rush  12:56

Okay, that's exactly right. And, you know, if you think about it a lot, the department is a little bit different. But I think in a law firm, the only data that really belongs to you are like your financial and personnel records. I mean, that's an oversimplification. But it's the things that, that you need to run your business. Everything else belongs to a client.

 

Debbie Reynolds  13:19

Right? Absolutely. And then to an organization's as you know, I worked, you know, in, you know, the litigation support area, and eDiscovery before it had an E in front of it. But you know, we are working in that those areas, you're protecting data in different ways, right? So you're protecting it because maybe it's the trade secret, or there's a privilege issue or something. So this is just a different type of protection for the data.

 

Joy Heath Rush  13:50

Yeah. And there's one of the things that brought this home to me a lot. Two is the Sidley, General Counsel of kind of my early technology days, and he's retired now; he is an absolute prince of a person. But he once said to me, two things keep me up at night. The first is that the courts will ask me to produce something, and I can't because I don't know where it is. And the second is, the courts will ask me to destroy something, and I can't because I don't know where it is. So the flip side of data privacy, in order to keep something secure, you know where it is, right? And that's the dots that I think sometimes people don't connect. If we don't know that stuff is sitting in your Gmail if we don't know that stuff is sitting on your phone or on your home computer. There's nothing we can do to secure it. No, is it inside the bank vault, we can lock the vault in, but if it's sitting on the floor in the bank lobby, there's not a lot we can do.

 

Debbie Reynolds  14:44

Right? And I think that I think the cloud complicates that issue now. Because before, I was like, you have to get permission to install a certain application. You have to get, you know, approval for the money to do that where now people are signing up for these free apps. We're storing things in the cloud in different places. And it makes you know the cybersecurity folks that make their job harder when they don't know where things are.

 

Joy Heath Rush  15:10

Well, I think for people like you who are working with organizations and deal with Data Privacy all the time, you have to help communicate to people that I know you do that, that the cloud is not monolithic. You know, there are many, many clouds, and not all clouds are created equal. So to say, you know, all clouds are inherently insecure. Is that not correct? But you have people who have to do their due diligence about cloud security. And what's happening rather than just saying, oh, all cloud applications are fine, or no cloud applications are fine. I was, I was doing a session for a bunch of law firm General Counsel, a year and a half or so ago, we were talking about law firm kind of resistance to cloud technology. And it was me and Michelle Gasmeyer from Dentons. And a bunch of other folks were there, too. But I said, raise your hand if you like, use the cloud, in some aspect in your law firm, and almost no hands went up. Then I said, raise your hand if you use DocuSign. And every single hand in the room? And I said you do get that it's only in the cloud. Right? And they're kind of looking at each other like what? But it was. It helped them see that it's not? It's not all one. It's not one size fits all when it comes to the cloud.

 

Debbie Reynolds  16:35

Yeah, I don't know. I feel like the campaign calling it the cloud makes it seem so nice and fluffy. Right. So innocent, awesome. The cloud, in the cloud, or whatever.

 

Joy Heath Rush  16:47

Riding on a rainbow?

 

Debbie Reynolds  16:51

Yeah, I always tell people I want yes. It's basically off someone else's computer. It's not on your computer, but you still have responsibility for that data. So they're not going to do everything for you. They're just hosting the information for you. So yeah, this is funny. So I have seen a transition where I've had people say they didn't want stuff in the cloud because they thought it was insecure. And I thought it's more secure if it was down the hall for them, to oh, my God, we have to get stuff from a cloud because we can't have stuff on-premise. So you know, I think you're right. We need to have more nuanced conversations about the cloud. It can't be the cloud is all bad, or whatever. And it's so funny, because I asked someone, many years ago, who was against the cloud, and I said, where is the internet? And they're like, ah, all right, don't you have like a Gmail account? Yeah, well, that's in the cloud. It's not on your computer. So I'll just have to tell them.

 

Joy Heath Rush  17:52

Well, and I think that you were talking about cybersecurity professionals, but people that are working in Data Privacy, like you too, you know, I think even more so you have to deal with regulations. You know, it's not just the technology. And even within the 50 United States, there are a multiplicity of regulations you get out of the United States, and you have one set for New Zealand and one set for Germany and was that Argentina has some new ones that are very challenging. So keeping up with that, and for a global organization to try to be aware of and manage to the standards of all these multiple jurisdictions is like, it's impossible to keep on top of it. Between that and multiple clouds, you really have to have experts to focus on that 100% of the time.

 

Debbie Reynolds  18:42

I agree. I agree. What thing in the privacy realm, either in business or personally, kind of concerning you the most that is happening now?

 

Joy Heath Rush  18:52

Yeah, that's really that's a really interesting question. I would say, I mean, I was very struck by the documentary, "The Social Dilemma," I think many people have seen that and kind of the algorithm and, and how your private information is even seen differently by different people kind of their lens and the algorithm. I'm not saying either good or bad. I think that's up to a person's value judgment. But I'm not sure enough people are educated about it. So I would say that probably the number one concern I have is that people don't know when they're surrendering their rights to privacy because they don't understand enough about the technology or about the requirements. And you know, a lot of identity theft and things like that happened to people or because they have willingly surrendered their personal information to someone else that they had every reason to believe was using it for a good purpose, but other people were able to take advantage of it. So education, lack of education. To me, that's a very, very, very big deal on the privacy front. I think the second one is, and this is much more for business than personal, but there are personal applications too, is about law enforcement. I mean, I come from a police family. I'm, you know, I've always been a fan of law enforcement and but you have to understand where law enforcement's boundaries begin and end with your rights in whatever country or city you live as a citizen. You know, this has certainly been a big concern of large law firms, and clouds are, okay, what if my client data again, it's not my data, it's my client's data. And I'm a steward of it. I've got it in the cloud, and law enforcement issues a subpoena against that data. What do I do? And again, it's about being educated. It's knowing what the risks are because nothing is 100% bad and nothing is 100% good. It's figuring out in the continuum what the risk is, what the reward is, and what you're willing to risk. So it's, it's kind of your personal data. And what law enforcement is looking for those two things are related, but it's being educated about what happens to your data, whether it's yours or your companies or your clients.

 

Debbie Reynolds  21:11

Yeah. And I always tell people, you know, when you go into, you know, working with a company or privacy stuff, it is never going to work. If you go in there, like, you know, Alexander, hey, like, I'm in charge. Now, that's never gonna happen, right. But a lot of it is really talking about being transparent with the client about what the first of all, what the laws are, what they what their data touches, that applies those laws. And then they have to choose what their risk appetite, it is, you know, do you really want to do X, Y, and Z. And I see some people go way overboard. With stuff, where, you know, for me, I always try to try to talk about it and kind of a common-sense way. So being able to make sure it's reasonable for what you're doing, and not go crazy.

 

Joy Heath Rush  22:03

Doing and actually, there's a great, I think analogy there to disaster recovery planning. So if you are in Southern California, you're gonna plan more for wildfires and earthquakes than you are for tornadoes. Right? Those don't really happen in Southern California. No, if you're in Chicago, you're not so worried about hurricanes, right? But tornadoes and cold are a big deal. So it understands the threat landscape, the risk landscape, and managing to that. And I think that applies equally to Data Privacy. There's actually a lot of corollaries between disaster recovery planning and data privacy, protection planning.

 

Debbie Reynolds  22:49

Absolutely, that and data retention is a huge issue, as you know, in legal is, you know, an epidemic of data, too much data kept entirely too long. You know, and so I think that I think the privacy laws are really pushing the boundaries with that, you know, saying that you really have to have a purpose of retaining the data can't be just well, I don't know, let's just keep it just because, you know, so being able to have a purpose, I think, will really push, you know, push the needle or push the needle on people thinking more about what they retain and why.

 

Joy Heath Rush  23:31

Yeah, I think, and again, it gets back to why it's like, if people understand, I'll go back to that example of the law students. So, you know, someone's got to tell them that that data doesn't belong to them. They'll be like, oh, it's kind of like, you know, think about back when you were a kid. And if ever you spilled something on a library book, oh, my God, that's not my book. Right?

 

Debbie Reynolds  23:56

Right.

 

Joy Heath Rush  23:57

But you had to know it wasn't your book, right? People coming into the practice have to learn this is not my book. This belongs to my client. It belongs to Ford Motor Company, or General Electric, or Deloitte. It's not mine. And that's where it starts.

 

Debbie Reynolds  24:14

Yeah. Right. Defensible deletion, or making sure that you're, you know, going back for the data, make sure that you're not keeping more than usip at all, a lot of times what happens on many cases, once the discovery stuff and the heavy lifting with the vacuum is sort of like an abandoned amusement park.

 

Joy Heath Rush  24:37

Yeah, I always call it a landfill. You're actually kinder than me. And people are always worried that there's, there's a diamond bracelet somewhere in this 30-acre landfill. And is that worth the risk, you know, right. And its consistent application of the past. To it not kind of being voluntary, but it is centrally managed so that it's, oh, well, we're following a retention policy if it's the New York office, but we're not following it up. It's the San Francisco office or whatever. It's, yeah, not something you can do.

 

Debbie Reynolds  25:17

So how has COVID impacted you and your organization in a privacy sense? I know so much has changed for all of us. But I'm curious.

 

Joy Heath Rush  25:28

You know, that's a really interesting question. I would say the digitization of personal connections has impacts on privacy in ways that you don't necessarily realize. So you know, if I'm at an in-person event, where there are 50 people, and I'm across the room, they might not be able to get a good look at me, or they might not be able to see my badge and see what it says. But if I'm on the Zoom screen, you know, I'm in a nice box, I'm nicely centered, I, you can see my file. And because we're taught to do this, it's got my name and my organization right there in the box, so you can see it. You're always identifying yourself in ways that I think we didn't when we were together in person, that that's an interesting planet. I also think that you know, one of the issues we encounter at ILTA is we have members with sponsors, they're all members of our community and valued members of our community, but they interact, members and business partners interact with each other in different ways than members with members and business partners with a business partner. And so with all of the contacts being digital, the opt-in, I want to provide my contact information, or I don't, and what is that contact information? And how is it going to be used, and when all the contacts or contacts are digital, people are thinking more about that. So I think that being aware of your digital presence and the potential privacy implications of a bigger digital presence is probably something where people don't connect too much.

 

Debbie Reynolds  27:15

Right. And then too when we were in office or having phone calls, instead of video calls, you know, you will see as the background on what's happening, you know, you know, people walk past, you know, past some different things. And that's kind of a way that you're kind of almost involuntarily sharing, right?

 

Joy Heath Rush  27:37

You totally, I mean, like, you can't see that people were listening, but my cat is looking at Debbie right now, jumped on my lap. While we were talking. Actually, I had a CIO tell me yesterday or laughing that, as we're thinking about returning to the office, one of his biggest concerns is how he's going to commute with his dog. Because he's not used to having his dog with him at home while he's working, but yeah, you people can see what's in your house, you know, they can see members of your family walking by people are exposed to all kinds of private information that they wouldn't have been exposed to before and, and you're not thinking about it? I don't know. It's a really intriguing question. And I think that we've, we've seen the good side of that, like, people are human, they have kids that are running around screaming and, you know, wearing pots on their heads and everything. You know, we've seen people's pets, and you see what art they have on their walls? And that's very human. It connects us in ways that we couldn't have connected with before. But it also reveals more about yourself, maybe then you realize, or that you necessarily want people to know. Yeah.

 

Debbie Reynolds  28:50

So you would typically have before COVID obviously a lot of different events for ILTA in person and digital also now, what are your plans for this year?

 

Joy Heath Rush  29:02

Oh, I'm so excited to talk about that. Well, last year, we were, of course, all digital. And we were so excited about the opportunities that that afforded us. I mean, we had 1100 people who had never attended an lLTACON before that we're able to come because it was digital. We had representation from 26 countries. I mean, that's fantastic. Those are the things that digital gives you, but people are want to be back together again there. You know, we've all heard about COVID fatigue; people are looking for human connection. And but there are still restrictions in place we have to manage, so we will be in person. Join us. You know, we have limited registration to 600 people, but we have slots open we have a lot of register, but we still have some openings, come and register and join us. We'll get Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, but it'll be a hybrid event. So the digital register will open next week. And we'll have, you know, 600 or so people members, and then another 600 or so business partners there in person, and then we'll have probably 1000 or two that will be joining just digitally. And we'll be trying to connect them. We're doing some really unique and fun things to help people that are there in person connect with the people who are at home or in their office. 

 

Debbie Reynolds  30:26

That's brilliant, to make it a hybrid of met. I don't know. I feel like work after this will be hybrid was as well.

 

Joy Heath Rush  30:35

I think the big difference Debbie will be that two things one, we will never or unlikely, again, be in a place where we're either 100% at home, or 100% in the office, you know, it's going to be some slider on some days, 30% will be in the office, and 70% will be home some days, it'll be 50/50. It'll just depend. But that gets to the second thing is that an office, your office will be a place you can work, not the primary place you work. And you have to think about someone who used this phrase yesterday in a meeting. I was in presence with a purpose. And I really liked that you begin to think about what it is you go to the office for what can only be done at the office and then fitting out the office to suit those purposes. I know in law firms in the practice of law, but also in litigation support Data Privacy, all the places you came from, look how much you learned in an apprenticeship type mode, right? Learning from the person a couple of years ahead of you in their career, and working side by side with them, and absorbing all that by osmosis. That hasn't been happening the last 13 months, right? Same way. So that's going to be one of the main reasons we go back to the office, let's make sure that we've really fitted supplied scheduled on every made the office a place where learning is a primary goal of down

 

Debbie Reynolds  32:12

I always thought that it was crazy that everyone left the house at the same time and went back and didn't understand. And so, I would have teams on staggered schedules. And a lot of people didn't. Sometimes management didn't like that idea, which was perfect, because people you know, maybe someone has an errand run in the morning, or, you know, it lets them pick up their kids at a certain time. And it was great.

 

Joy Heath Rush  32:38

I see. I'm always with you about that. And I grew up in the Washington DC area and the Federal government. I don't know. I must have been a teenager when they did this, when on what they call Flex time. So you could report to the office anywhere between 6 am, and 10 am. And you could leave anywhere between 2 pm and 6 pm or whatever that came out to. And that was fantastic. I mean, if I had worked for the Federal government, I'd have worked six to two for sure. I'm totally. But I was like you. I always wanted to give people staggered schedules because they're more satisfied. Oh, yeah. That's to deal with traffic. And it actually lets you provide more service to write all at more different hours in the

 

Debbie Reynolds  33:21

Absolute right, I was able to expand my coverage quite a lot. And people love it. They thought it was great. So hopefully, people are started thinking about that. Unfortunately, we haven't started talking about that because of COVID, because we have to work in new ways. But to me, I think this will be a watershed moment for legal where a lot of times a lot of things that we were doing, we were doing just because it had always been done.

 

Joy Heath Rush  33:47

Right. Yep, that's right. I mean, it's, and I can remember, I used to always have three or four different projects I'd put in my budget every year knowing they would be cut. I used to call them sacrificial lamb projects. And because people didn't have the appetite for it. These were digital, sometimes digital transformation pate, we used to call the paperless office, softphones, things like that. They're like, No, no, it's fine. If it's ain't broke, don't fix it, kind of thing. But those issues really got surfaced. I mean, I can't tell you how many technology people I heard from organizations where they were still printing and marking up performance. Well done, you know, like, dang, that's, that's really hard before at home, and all of a sudden, there was a real appetite for these business process type projects. And you see big firms putting in systems like ServiceNow and other kinds of big enterprise service management systems because they've realized that there's a real bang for the buck and real benefit to be had by having more things that are digital and more things that are processed. Of course, then that's where we have to call Debbie and say now what is the implications of this for privacy. I know they're having.

 

Debbie Reynolds  35:04

Absolutely, yes, it's such a big ball of wax. And it's so different. So I'm excited because I get well as you know, I love. I love digital projects. I love the future. So things that are merging, I'm always looking ahead to see you know what's happening. So people are saying,

 

Joy Heath Rush  35:24

But your real gift is that you can look at the trends and see where that trend line logically is going to head. And, you know, a lot of people love that famous quote from Wayne Gretzky, the hockey player, don't skate to where the puck is, skate to where the puck is going to be. And the people right now who are being most successful are the ones that are really gifted at knowing where the puck is going to be. And you're definitely one of those people.

 

Debbie Reynolds  35:51

Oh, you made me cry.

 

35:56

I told y'all listening. We have a mutual admiration society.

 

Debbie Reynolds  35:59

Absolutely. So if it was the world according to Joy, and we would do everything you say, What would be your wish for privacy either in the US or around the world? Either, you know, law, our technology, anything,

 

Joy Heath Rush  36:14

My wish for privacy is that people would recognize the way bad actors could work. And be smart about it. And my second one would that well-intentioned people be kind about other people's privacy goofs. And remember that on any given day, it could be you.

 

Debbie Reynolds  36:41

Those are good ones. Those are good ones. Yeah, totally. You know, I, I had a meeting, family meeting recently where we were, you know, because we can't travel, right? We're just like, oh, what are you, what's happening in California? What's happening here and there. And I decided to throw out some cyber tips because I'm like, hey, don't click on that link in the email. Because, I mean, this is stuff that people are dealing with every day. And I felt like if I if someone had, you know, clicked on a link, and I hadn't told them, I would feel bad, you know, and I could actually, you know, tell them that.

 

Joy Heath Rush  37:15

I think that we are not alone in that. And I've had a lot of fun on Zoom calls with various members of my family who accidentally set their background as something they don't want. Or like, that famous video that's gone viral about the cat. I mean, the lawyer that puts the cat Instagram filter on and, like, gets rid of this actually been kind of fun.

 

Debbie Reynolds  37:42

Right? Exactly, yeah. And then, you know, I am not naive enough to think that I know everything about, you know, cyber threats. So I think everyone should be vigilant because you just don't know. I mean, these guys, that's all they do 24 hours a day, think about how they can do.

 

Joy Heath Rush  38:00

Exactly right. It's not just individuals, it's criminal and enterprises, it's nation-states. And so the vigilance is super important. And actually, one of the alphas, one of our activities is we have an advisory group called the Legal Set Steering Committee who really focus on security issues, and legal, that's their thing. And one of the initiatives they have is called It Takes a Village, you know, things that because security isn't a competitive advantage, you know that Debbie. Data Privacy isn't a competitive advantage. We're only as good as the weakest link in the chain and in the supply chain for legal services. And there is a supply chain. People don't like to think about it, but there is. And so if we don't help each other, somewhere, somebody else's failure to respect privacy or to manage security is going to affect us.

 

Debbie Reynolds  38:50

That's right. Exactly. Exactly. I always say anybody's problem is everybody's problem. Okay, I

 

Joy Heath Rush  38:58

I might have to steal that one. I'll remember to attribute it to you.

 

Debbie Reynolds  39:01

Please do, please do. It's like, you know, I can't ignore the harm is happening to someone else and think that's not going to impact me at some point. So yeah, excellent. Well, this is fantastic. Thank you so much. I'm so excited to have you on the show. Keep doing what you're doing. As always, when we first got this job, I sent you a message like this, this, your role is perfect. It's perfect for you. So I love what you're doing.

 

Joy Heath Rush  39:27

And you're very lucky clients have to be happy that you're in your consulting business. And I also just have to say again, our listeners can't see it. But you have the most fabulous, beautiful tulips behind you. I love all the colors. And I tell you anytime I can spend 30 minutes with you, Debbie, I'm gonna do it as you've been a pleasure.

 

Debbie Reynolds  39:48

Oh, wow. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much, Joy. I really appreciate you being on the show.

 

Joy Heath Rush  39:54

My pleasure.