Difficult to track legal holds in a spreadsheet? Imagine a site where executives, staff, and legal teams all have access to pending hold requests. Simplifying the process of preserving ESI ensures a better outcome for any size project.
What is a Legal Hold?
A legal hold is the process organizations and groups use to communicate to specific parties to safeguard and preserve evidence for litigation. Legal holds may be self-implemented but are often ordered by the court and are typically in response to issues dealing with contract breaches, audits, or complaints.
It is important to note that a legal hold is also known as a litigation hold. Legal holds cover all forms of relevant information in digital form. Notes, forms, agendas, photos, and every format of electronically stored data must typically be preserved during a legal hold.
How We Optimize the Legal Hold Process
Although navigating the legal hold process may appear complex and intimidating at first glance, it doesn’t have to be an overwhelming experience. FRONTEO employs our experience and tried-and-true methods to optimize the litigation hold process for you.
We always provide:
- Swift action to guarantee that your data preservation measures are initiated in time to properly prepare for litigation
- Open, clear communication to help ensure that your organization and custodians of important electronic receive clear instructions
- Oversight and monitoring to help ensure that all actions are in strict compliance with legal hold rules and instructions
- Regular and proactive follow-ups
At FRONTEO, we make sure your organization is prepared to confidently handle the data preservation issues that arise when litigation becomes a reality.
FRONTEO's Expertise
The FRONTEO Preservation Team develops workflow-driven legal hold methodologies to safeguard potential evidence. Doing so ensures the data is captured in a legally defensible manner and is not destroyed or altered in any way. The FRONTEO Preservation Team:
- Automates manual legal hold processes, ensuring appropriate notifications, reminders, and escalations are distributed to custodians
- Combines experience with technology to deliver increased productivity and data protection
- Routinely performs code and encryption-cracking, searches for and retrieves elusive data, determines potential deletion of files, and recovers deleted files
Advanced Preservation Solution
Utilizing advanced technology tools, FRONTEO’s Preservation Team:
- Develops detailed preservation policies to fit specific needs
- Works with clients to collect or lock down data
- Conducts ongoing audits to ensure custodians are following the process
Advanced Legal Hold Technologies
Utilizing either KIBIT Automator legal hold applications, FRONTEO is able to customize processes to fit specific needs while assuring that preserved data will flow seamlessly into the next steps of the eDiscovery process. FRONTEO’s Preservation team utilizes Legal Hold technologies to:
- Develop automated, defensible, and repeatable processes
- Monitor and track every aspect of the legal hold and preservation process
- Manage custodian lists
Legal Hold FAQs
What is a Litigation Hold?
A litigation hold or legal hold is intended to help locate and preserve various documents, forms, and other similar evidence for the purposes of reasonably anticipated litigation. In other words, a litigation hold involves the safeguarding of evidence that may be pertinent to an approaching or ongoing legal action.
When Do Legal Holds Happen?
Legal holds often occur when an organization or group is reasonably likely to be involved in litigation of some sort in the foreseeable future. A legal hold may also occur in response to other legal processes as well, such as audits or reviews.
What Is a Legal Hold Notice?
A legal hold notice is a notice that is communicated to the custodians of important documents needed for potential litigation or another legal matter. It clearly states that the custodian must locate and safeguard certain documents, forms, photos, and more for approaching legal matters.
The notice should also provide some details about how custodians are to preserve records and which records to preserve.
What is a Preservation Notice?
A preservation notice is a communication from a certain party informing them of potential litigation or some other legal process in the near future and that party’s need to preserve specific evidence. The evidence to be preserved will be detailed in the letter, as will any information relating to times and dates for complying with the notice.
What is a Preservation Request?
A preservation request is a request from one party to another to locate and preserve specific types and forms of evidence for an imminent legal action, such as a lawsuit. The scope of the request should be clearly communicated in the preservation request, and a stated time period to preserve said evidence should also appear in the preservation request.
What Kind of Information Has to Be Preserved?
The type of information needing to be preserved depends entirely on the nature of the approaching litigation or legal matter. Generally speaking, preservation orders may cover all manner of information and evidence contained in numerous different forms, from emails and other types of electronically stored information to photos, videos, and hard copies of information and data.
Depending on the type of organization, these forms of evidence may specifically be found as:
- Employer and employee work manuals and handbooks
- Contracts and agreements
- Reports and audits
- Employee or employer evaluation records
- Data from electronic storage devices like black boxes
- Logs and service records
- Project data
- Records of sales, purchases, and other financial transactions
If you are dealing with a legal hold and have received a preservation request or a legal notice hold, FRONTEO’s experience and expertise can greatly benefit your organization. Our team will work diligently to ensure compliance with the request while protecting your interests.