Aungate Legal Hold | Notification Management | Preservation and Collection

Notification Management

A powerful, unique and cost effective solution for legal hold lifecycle management

Top of mind among legal and IT executives is the critical principle that an organization has a duty to preserve relevant electronically stored information (ESI) when litigation or an investigation is reasonably anticipated. It’s an ever-increasing priority because failure to preserve and produce ESI has severe consequences under the amended FRCP including sanctions, fines and damaging media coverage. However, executing a defensible process for managing and tracking the lifecycle of multiple legal holds simultaneously is a truly daunting function facing most of the global 2000.

Aungate Legal Hold Notification Management is a powerful application that enables legal, IT, compliance and records management teams to establish repeatable, cost effective and defensible legal hold processes and practices. It is a holistic solution built to manage cases, custodians, notifications, acknowledgements, collections and dispositions. Fully auditable, the solution is easy to use and quickly implements workflow that demonstrates "good faith effort". Each action of the legal hold lifecycle is consistently and efficiently executed and managed, from identifying potential custodians and data sources straight through to evidence collection – all on a single, highly scalable and secure platform that is easily expanded to add EDD processing, review and production modules.

Notification and Identification

In addition to preserving and ultimately producing responsive information, an organization responding to litigation and investigations must also provide documentation about its processes and chain-of-custody to validate and confirm the completeness and accuracy of their preservation and collection procedures and implementation. Aungate Legal Hold Notification Management is the first solution to utilize real-time policy management to track the end-to-end workflow on a single, scalable platform, lowering cost and risk. Beginning with custodian identification, the solution automates notification workflow through to preservation and collection and provides user-friendly reporting capabilities. This enables the legal team to comply with FRCP, minimize the organization’s vulnerability to fines and prepare for the meet and confer. In addition the Notification Management module is the first to offer multiple "Trust and Verify" options for ESI preservation, including preserving-in-place on PCs and servers, uploading to a central drop zone, or both.

Identifying custodians

The Aungate Legal Hold Notification solution drastically reduces the time and guesswork traditionally associated with identifying those individuals who may be connected to a potential case - the first step in preparing for anticipated litigation. By plumbing in to an organization’s IT infrastructure, the policy-based application is able to source custodian information from a variety of directories, such as a company’s Active Directory or HR system, in order to search for any individuals who match a certain set of determined criteria based on the parameters of the case. After automatically matching the criteria against the organization’s operational systems, the application will return a suggested set of custodians to be included in the legal hold process, while also maintaining connectivity in order to capture any changes or modifications that could affect the employee’s custodian status. Thus a real-time data map is generated for known locations of custodial data, enhancing FRCP readiness.

In addition, if the case administrator would like to reuse a group of custodians from a previous case that may be relevant, they are able to simply import and export those lists on an ad hoc basis from within the application in order to manage the new legal matter more effectively.

Automating notification workflows

The notification process is a critical element in the overall lifecycle of legal hold management. Once a set of potential custodians has been identified, a series of notification workflows must be designed and initiated in order to conduct interviews, monitor receipt and acknowledgement of legal hold notifications in real-time, and ultimately begin the collection process. To greatly simplify this process, the Aungate Legal Hold Notification Management solution has been developed with a series of built-in interview forms and notification templates that are fully customizable to the details of a particular case. Depending on an individual’s answers in the initial interview, a policy driven secondary notification workflow can automatically be triggered to alert them to their status as a custodian, issue a legal hold over any relevant information at their disposal, request their acknowledgement of the legal hold and escalate the matter if a timely response is not received – each of which is a critical step in creating a repeatable and defensible "good faith" process in accordance with FRCP regulations.

"Trust and Verify" Preservation and Collection Policy

Aungate Legal Hold Notification Management offers companies a number of different options to help protect them against the enormous risks and costs associated with preserving and collecting potentially relevant ESI. The simplest approach is to issue a preservation request via the module’s notification feature, alerting custodians to the legal hold and asking them to preserve any data that might be relevant to the pending litigation. This notification-based process is fully auditable and defensible, enabling an organization to demonstrate "good faith effort" in preservation and eventual disposition of potentially relevant ESI.

Custodians are then trusted to collect the data on their own and submit it to the data stewards managing the case via an FTP site, compressed zip file or data CD. In addition, the Legal Hold Notification module allows custodians to make deliberate and immediate contributions to the collection within the application itself. Upon receiving a preservation request, custodians can simply select any documents that they consider to be relevant to the case and manually upload them to a secure, tamper-proof "drop zone" built within the Legal Hold module. Once the documents have been placed in the drop zone, the system will automatically collect, index and archive the information into centralized repository with advanced search capabilities for easy and accurate retrieval at the time of litigation.

Creating Real-time Audits and Reports

The Aungate Legal Hold Notification application boasts an intuitive central dashboard that allows users to maintain full visibility in to the ongoing status of each element of the legal hold lifecycle and quickly audits and generates reports of this information as needed. This dashboard approach enables a real-time early detection system that can alert data stewards to a lack of acknowledgements, requests for help, upcoming dates and aging scenarios, as well as new data systems and stewards. Included in the user-friendly dashboard are up-to-the minute statistics on divisions, cases, requests, and collection and preservation efforts. All of this information can be captured and included in the audit reports, which also track the solution’s ongoing automatic preservation of information in place, as well as any follow-on collection. The result is a comprehensive audit tracking and reporting capability that enables the legal team to rapidly and completely defend any challenge to the validity of the information produced.

Integrated with Real-time Policy Management

The Aungate Legal Hold Notification Management module leverages the Real-time Policy Management platform, which enables an organization to implement and integrate corporate policies into any notification workflow. This unique capability provides an ongoing proactive monitoring of custodians and their information in order to issue auto-reminders and escalations, as well as rescind any holds that are no longer necessary, in accordance with routine, pre-determined company policies. Also, if a custodian is terminated, data stewards are automatically notified to suspend normal turnover procedures that might result in the disposition of data relevant to the case.

Corporate retention and disposition policies may also be integrated in to the system’s Preservation and Collection capabilities, enabling the organization to automatically identify and place a hold on only the information that matches the criteria outlined in those policies. This is a significant advantage that leverages the industry leading IDOL engine to dramatically reduce the amount of information that is subject to legal review down the line, without putting additional strain on legal or IT resources.

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