Legal Hold

Legal Hold involves locating and identifying every piece of information in the organization that could potentially be relevant within the context of a legal matter and taking steps to protect that information until the matter is resolved. This includes traditional paper-based information as well as Electronically Stored Information (ESI) on servers and end user desktops and laptops. All normally scheduled or ad hoc deletion or disposition processes must be suspended for any information that is subject to a legal hold. Failure to enforce legal holds can lead to steep fines and penalties. Or worse, if the organization deletes information during the course of litigation, a judge can issue an "adverse inference," which essentially says that it can be assumed that deletions were intentionally meant to hide something incriminating. Forgoing deletion entirely and preserving all corporate information indefinitely generates huge storage costs and incurs increased corporate risks by failing to delete eligible material.

How Do Manual Legacy Techniques Approach the Problem of Legal Hold?

Mature and well proven technologies now exist to manage, preserve and produce information from corporate content servers. However, the information stored at the edge of the network on end user desktop and laptop machines has been much more difficult to control. Typically these machines are managed by the end users themselves and are beyond the direct control of the corporate IT team. Furthermore, these machines lack standardization in terms of applications, content, structure and organization. Satisfying the legal obligation to preserve this information has been a tremendous challenge for most organizations, and has been an ongoing source of legal vulnerability.

A number of approaches to the problem of desktop and laptop information have been applied, most of which are manual and expensive, and all of which are seriously flawed. One approach has been to send an alert to all users that are within the scope of a given legal hold policy advising them of the need to preserve related information, and relying upon them to comply. This approach relies upon the cooperation, competence and honesty of a large number of users who are not legal professionals and who can only be expected to devote a small part of their time and energy to the problem. Another approach has been to dispatch a team of IT professionals to visit each desktop and manually collect the information that is required. This could be achieved either by taking a complete image of every disk, or by explicitly copying selected folders, files, documents and other information. These processes are costly and time- consuming.

How Does Autonomy ZANTAZ Resolve the Challenge of Legal Hold?

Aungate Legal Hold provides the industry's first fully automated and effective solution for preserving important corporate information on end user desktops and laptops. The legal hold policies are captured centrally by a case manager, and are automatically disseminated to all desktop and laptop machines on the network. The key to the solution is Autonomy's IDOL engine, which runs on the desktop and laptop machines themselves, applying a full array of keyword, Boolean and metadata searching as well as concept analysis to distinguish between significant corporate information and personal or irrelevant information. Information that is within the scope of the legal hold policy is immediately and automatically locked down in place at the disk sector level, and is also copied across the network to a central server. By fully automating the desktop preservation and collection processes, the product avoids the high cost and protracted effort of manual solutions. In addition, the patented IDOL algorithms ensure that the significant information is preserved while avoiding problematic privacy issues and the cost of copying and storing irrelevant information. Finally, the policies are enforced continuously, protecting information whether the machine is online or offline, and automatically updating the collected information over time.