Integrated legal hold and notification for managing the entire duty to preserve process.
Courts have a variety of actions and sanctions in their arsenal to penalize corporations for failure to preserve data. Recently the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recently affirmed, in Eon-Net LP v. Flagstar Bancorp, No. 2009-1308 (Fed. Cir., July 29, 2011), a decision that assessed almost $500,000 in attorney’s fees against a patent licensing and litigation firm for litigation misconduct, including failure to preserve documents.
Enterprises have taken different strategies to meet the spirit of material preservation. Whether it’s custodial notification, hold-in-place, targeted collections, or a combination of the three, StoredIQ has an integrated Legal Hold & Notification solution that will meet the needs of your organization.
Historically, performing legal holds has been a manual, silo’d, and labor intensive process spanning a multitude of data sources and custodians, making it time-consuming to administer and almost impossible to track. This complex process also heavily relied on custodian self-preservation which greatly interrupts daily workplace productivity and often results in evidence spoliation.
With StoredIQ Legal Hold & Notification, companies can take advantage of a simplified yet robust solution for managing the entire legal hold process. Following an intuitive eDiscovery-based workflow from notification, to tracking acknowledgement, to analyzing custodial data, and finally collection and preservation – legal and IT users gain complete control and insight into the duty to preserve process with a reliable, repeatable, and auditable solution that seamlessly integrates hold notifications with the collection and preservation of data.
Notification
With StoredIQ users can quickly select potential custodians and initiate hold notifications, determine follow-up intervals for non-responders, choose escalation contacts, and arrange reminder notices. After notifications have been distributed users can track acknowledgements at-a-glance with a simple dashboard.
Early Case Assessment
Once potential custodians have been notified users can take advantage of StoredIQ’s unique Analyze Anywhere technology. Legal teams can perform early case analysis on data where it natively resides, omit non-relevant data from the scope based on 100s of possible analytic dimensions, and get an immediate look at the potential size of matter data at the earliest possible point in the legal process.
Targeted Collection
With a simple click, data can be copied from a multitude of data sources to a secure repository for legal hold. To ensure that the copy is forensically sound, a hash is performed on the source file and is compared to a hash of the copy on the repository. In addition, the entire set of metadata associated with the file is preserved, including any classifications that have been placed on the data for legal, records or compliance reasons. This classification data is invaluable as it provides significant insight for the legal analyst or counsel during downstream formal review, enabling a faster, qualitatively enriched review process. The entire legal hold process is documented with comprehensive audit trails, preserving the authenticity and a chain-of-custody.
In instances where the same files are relevant for multiple cases, StoredIQ will copy and place on legal hold only a single instance of that file. If that file is required for multiple matters, each matter will utilize that single copy, saving storage space as well as the time and bandwidth required to collect the data. And, with incremental collections, only files that are new or have been modified since the last collection will be collected for preservation, further streamlining the collection process. Only when all matters for a given file are concluded, and the obligation for legal hold is removed, will the file be available for disposition from the repository. Since StoredIQ Legal Hold is synchronized across all applications, including Legal, Records Management, and Compliance; a file that is no longer relevant for a legal matter, may still in fact be obligated to legal hold for other use cases, and will therefore continue to be held.
Hold-in-Place
As an alternative to copying data to a repository for legal hold, StoredIQ also supports the ability to hold data in-place. This strategy is typically recommended for existing archives that don’t contain work-in-progress data. In these cases StoredIQ will set the ‘hold-bit’ on items in these locations, while copying items from other data sources to the selected retention platform. When it comes time to export files for a given case, StoredIQ will automatically bring together the held files from the various repositories into a consolidated load file.
Additionally supported, but not recommended, is the ability to change permissions on responsive data to prevent the custodian from opening or editing the contents. There are two primary reasons that this is not an ideal solution. First, this approach locks users out of their data, leaving them potentially unable to conduct their normal course of business and job functions. Second, in the most malicious of examples, a worker could physically destroy their workstation (and, therefore, the local copy of potentially matter-relevant data). The preferred method of copying data to a preservation platform negates both of these issues.