EB002 Ten Legal Hold Software Considerations_FINAL

Ten Considerations for Selecting a Legal Hold Software Solution

Ten Considerations for Selecting a Legal Hold Software Solution Copyright © 2014 Exterro, Inc. ID# EB002-1014 // exterro.com // [email protected] // +1 (503) 501-5100

A strong legal hold framework forms the foundation for a defensible e-discovery process. Unfortunately, the legal hold process is widely considered the most difficult and frustrating e-discovery phase to manage. To help address this, large organizations have increasingly moved away from emails and spreadsheets to more specialized legal hold software solutions. Yet while the market has been flooded with legal hold products in recent years, many of these tools are nothing more than glorified email notification systems with few if any advanced capabilities.

This E-Book is geared towards readers who are actively involved in creating and managing legal holds and know there is a lot more to the process than simply issuing notices. Rather than focus on rudimentary features that even the most basic solutions provide, this guide highlights those advanced capabilities and features that really should be considered standard to meet the needs of enterprise class organizations with significant legal hold demands.


Legal holds involve more than just individual custodians. Matters often include structured data that resides on shared databases and other corporate systems that don’t belong to any one custodian, but rather are assigned to someone or a small group in IT, such as a database administrator. Unfortunately, most legal hold applications don’t allow for the inclusion of these non-custodial data sources (NCDSs) with custodians, necessitating the creation of multiple holds. This prevents you from getting a single, comprehensive view of all hold activity. Consider a legal hold solution that unifies custodians and NCDSs so you don’t need to create more holds in the system than what is necessary.

UnifiedLegal Holds


If you’re like most busy legal professionals, you probably don’t have time to draft legal hold notices from scratch when every new matter arises. Notice language templates expedite the hold creation process and help to improve the consistency of your process. However, it’s important to keep in mind that comprehensive legal hold templates must extend beyond just the language of the hold. Your e-discovery software solution should allow you to configure templates so that certain individuals are automatically copied on the notice, such as your company’s HR director for templates involving employment disputes. The templates themselves should also be very user friendly, allowing you to copy content directly from Microsoft Word and customize where action links, such as the launching of a custodian interview, are placed within the hold message.

Dynamic Templates

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Gathering information directly from custodians about the matter is an excellent way to improve the efficiency of your legal hold process. But interviews can also be a huge nuisance for busy workers. You can help bolster response rates by investing in a legal hold solution that enables custodians to respond to interviews via a mobile device or tablet, without having to be logged into the legal hold application. That way a custodian can respond to the request at a time and setting that’s most convenient for them. The interview templates should also be flexible so that creators can include different types of questions and response options and not be stuck with a single, rigid interview format for every legal hold. Also, some holds will necessitate the creation of multiple interviews and your legal hold system should allow for two or more interviews to be included in a single hold notice.

FlexibleInterviews


Reminder notices are now a common feature across legal hold software applications. What distinguishes a truly advanced system from a rudimentary one is the ability to customize the reminder schedule at the custodian level. Not all custodians have the same relationship to a matter. For individuals deemed to be key custodians, you may want to send reminder notices at a more frequent rate than those considered secondary players. Likewise, a busy executive might warrant more time in between notice reminders than someone who isn’t quite so inundated with emails. No matter what your situation, you want the flexibility in you legal hold solution to customize your custodian settings without having to create an entirely separate legal hold notice for each individual that’s on a separate schedule. This is especially useful for high profile custodians, like your CEO, who don’t want to be bothered by constant hold reminders. Another feature that shouldn’t be overlooked is proxy acknowledgment, whereby the system is configured to allow an administrator to respond on behalf of a custodian that may not have access to the system.

Consolidated Distributions & Reminders


Escalation Management Similar to reminder notices, automated escalation communications – notices sent to a non-responsive custodian’s supervisor – are now a fairly common feature among legal hold applications. However, very few systems allow recipients to access the escalation notices on various platforms (laptop, mobile, tablet) outside of the legal hold application. This is a critically important consideration when you consider that a supervisor might have limited involvement in the legal hold process and be less inclined to learn and navigate a potentially complex system just to review a single message. Look for a legal hold solution that delivers escalation notices just like regular email along with the ability to see all escalation in one place, which will greatly increase your odds that the notice will be seen and acted upon. Escalation notices should be customizable per custodian as it may not be warranted to generate escalation notices for all custodians.

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A custodian compliance portal essentially serves as a one stop shop for custodians to review all their hold obligations at once and take any needed actions without looking back through individual notices. The whole purpose of a compliance portal is to make life easier on custodians. Don’t invest in a legal hold application that simply lists all the custodian’s obligations in a format that isn’t very intuitive or user friendly. You should be able to configure the compliance portal so that custodians only see what they need to see and aren’t overwhelmed with various buttons and links that don’t correspond with any of their obligations. Also, look for a compliance portal that allows for all interviews and interaction with the legal team to be executed within the portal itself to eliminate extra steps in the process that might hinder compliance rates.

Robust Compliance Portal


Reporting is the foundation of a defensible legal hold process. Your legal hold software solution should empower defensible, auditable legal hold management with comprehensive reporting that summarizes all events and details within and across matters and custodians. No company wants to ever have their legal hold process questioned before a court. Should you find yourself in such a predicament, imagine how much better you’ll feel knowing that you have thorough documentation that supports all decisions and actions.

Custom Reporting


A legal hold process is only as strong as your ability to put the right custodians on hold and track any employee status changes that may warrant responsive action. Integrating your HR and legal hold systems is a good first step, but that really only gets you so far. The manual effort involved in actually following up on employee status changes can still be overwhelming. If you work for a large organization that deals with hundreds of employee departures or significant status changes per year, consider investing in a legal hold solution that can automate certain actions based on employee changes. For example, the system might automatically trigger an automated message to an IT administrator to preserve the laptop of a key custodian who has left the company. By removing manual intervention from the process, you can help mitigate the risk of evidence spoliation and keep focused on your core legal hold duties, not constantly chasing after the data of departed employees.

Custodian Tracking & Automation

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A strong legal hold process is influenced by information that resides across a variety of corporate systems. Make it a priority to invest in a legal hold solution that empowers a truly integrated approach. It starts with integrating your legal hold solution with your existing user authentication system (SSO, LDAP, etc.) so that authorized users can access the software without having to log in separately and also to prevent hold recipients from simply forwarding legal holds to unauthorized colleagues, such as an administrative assistant, for response. Other integrations that can greatly enhance your hold process include ones with your HR system, for scoping holds and tracking employee status changes; Asset Management system, for quickly identifying the relationship between employees and company data sources; and Matter Management system, for expediting the creation of legal holds and ensuring that matter information is correctly reflected in each associated hold. The option to connect in real-time to these systems can enhance your ability to react quickly to relevant data changes.

Authentication & Systems Integration

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While international data privacy laws aren’t well understood by United States legal teams, global companies are beginning to realize they can’t be ignored during the legal hold process. For instance, did you know that merely issuing a legal hold in Germany without including certain information in the notice or providing the option for the recipient to revoke consent to use their ESI can be deemed a violation of an individual’s privacy? Your legal hold software solution should include built-in controls and workflows that allow you to easily tailor your hold process to comply with all international data privacy requirements.

Global Privacy Controls

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EB002 Ten Legal Hold Software Considerations_FINAL

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