The Truth About Legal Hold

The legal hold marketplace is rife with misinformation. Some vendors would have you believe that it is defensible to send a hold notice and ask custodians to self-identify potentially relevant information. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

The legal hold is the act of complying with the preservation obligation -- the first and most important step in the litigation and investigation process. The case law is clear: the organization and legal team must take affirmative steps to ensure relevant data is preserved. A defensible legal hold requires that relevant data be actively preserved, and notification alone is not enough. Furthermore, custodian self-collection, the act of asking custodians to identify and preserve what they believe is relevant, is risky and courts repeatedly hold it is not defensible.

Legacy Techniques and the Challenge of Legal Holds

While legacy solutions may provide some ability to preserve information on structured data sources and in content management systems, the unstructured information on laptops, desktops, file and mail servers, SharePoint, and Wikis is much more difficult to control. Meeting the preservation obligation for this data is a tremendous challenge for most organizations in terms of time, cost, and risk as many of these sources are managed by the end-users themselves and beyond the direct control of IT. Furthermore, laptops may disconnect from the corporate network, remaining inaccessible for extensive periods. Although there are legacy approaches to collect this data, including self-collection and hard-drive imaging, these techniques are manual, expensive, and do not scale.

It is clear that a better approach is necessary. Organizations need a proactive, defensible and repeatable process for legal holds that will reduce time, cost, and risk, and Autonomy Legal Hold provides this solution.