subject: Automate And Manage Legal Hold Process [print this page] A legal hold is the process of preserving all forms of relevant information when litigation is reasonably anticipated. Besides litigation, a legal hold can be issued as a result of audit, government investigation or other such matter. It is issued in order to avoid evidence spoliation. When a legal hold is initiated by a notice or communication from legal counsel to an organization, the organization must at once suspend the normal processing of records, such as archived media, backup tape recycling, and other storage and management of documents and information. The legal hold that originally existed for paper documents was extended to electronically stored information (ESI) through recent amendments to the United States Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP).
A legal hold is a serious issue and therefore enterprises, corporations, law firms, and government agencies must put in place an effective solution to automate and manage their legal hold process. The following are some of the aspects that a legal hold application must include.
Hold Notices
It should create and sent hold notices quickly to relevant custodians and system administrators via email. Different notices should be sent to custodians and system administrators, streamlining the notification process. Notices should be sent immediately or scheduled for delivery.
Reminders
It should be able to schedule for delivery reminder email notices to non-responsive custodians, eliminating the need for manual follow-up.
Escalations
It should be able to schedule for delivery escalation email notices to a custodians manager if a custodian is not responsive. This simplifies the legal hold process while maximizing compliance.
Automated Tracking and Reporting
It should offer administrators immediate visibility into the status of all legal hold notices across all cases through a single pane of glass.
Survey Response Report
It should automatically capture survey responses and make it immediately available for analysis both in a summarized format and by the individual custodian via easy-to-read charts and graphs.
Custodian Audit Report
It should track every legal hold action, such as hold notice, response, confirmation, escalation, and release, and make it available via an exportable report, thus creating a complete and detailed audit trail.
With such software, enterprises can minimize the risk of sanctions while providing the highest level of defensibility across the entire ediscovery lifecycle.
