exterro
Exterro Fusion : Legal Hold
A Framework to Implement a Repeatable and Defensible Legal Hold Process
Request A Demo
What is Legal Hold?

Legal hold, or litigation hold, is a process by which an organization must preserve and prepare all forms of communication when litigation has begun, or is reasonably anticipated. Potential custodians (people within an organization who may have relevant information) need to be notified that they should not delete any relevant information.

Although legal hold is simple in theory, its execution can be quite complex. Fully compiled custodian lists can comprise thousands of people and data sources, and information preservation can reach across scores of different record types.
Why is it important?

The sheer quantity of electronically stored information (ESI) and the diversity of locations in which ESI may reside increase the difficulty of implementing effective legal holds. A company's failure to quickly impose a hold on all responsive records can result in damaging and costly court-ordered sanctions.

In the example of Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC, the defendant was heavily sanctioned for failing to properly implement a legal hold. In addition to the sanctions, UBS actions resulted in an adverse inference judgment, higher costs, and eventual loss of the case.
An Effective Legal Hold Strategy
  • At the onset of litigation, cast a wide net; one's primary focus should be on preserving the evidence rather than collecting the evidence
  • Understand the company's document retention policy
  • Consider legal hold as an ongoing process, rather than a standalone project
  • Maintain a data map that shows which custodians have what record types where
  • Send hold notices from the 'office of general counsel'
  • Periodically re-issue hold notices to both new and existing employees
Use custodian interview as an opportunity to confirm the preservation of evidence in accordance with holds.
Benefits of Implementing Fusion's Legal Hold Workflow Management

Using a highly standardized system like Fusion demonstrates your organization's commitment to the preservation of evidence and full cooperation with judicial/governmental requests and compliance. In concert with Fusion, a reliable, consistent, repeatable and defensible legal hold strategy:
  • Eliminates human errors in high-stakes litigation
  • Generates faster response time to litigation requests
  • Decreases an organization's exposure to sanctions
Features of Exterro Fusion Legal Hold
Flexible Legal Hold Work Flow Management Adaptability is built into Fusion's architecture, offering legal teams maximum flexibility. Fusion can be configured to best fit your specific needs with very little configurational change, and can be used by both general and outside counsel.
Dashboard Fusion's legal hold workflow management system offers a unique dashboard view of the entire scope of a project or projects. From the home page within Fusion, users can take a birds'-eye-view of all matters. A single interface lists all holds and shows their statuses, enabling users to drill down into each matter to view details, take action and complete tasks. From an intuitively organized dashboard, users can compose and apply legal hold notice templates, issue legal holds, view data maps, automatically set and send reminder notices, and communicate and collaborate with stakeholders.
Datasource Mapping Fusion broadens and enhances your current data map, enabling teams to build and maintain layers of information about data sources and custodians that will allow legal teams to quickly target highly valuable data when needed.
Hold Notice Distribution Select the key custodians from the global custodian list, with advice of counsel, assisted by powerful search features.
Data Source Catalog Maintain information about data sources that will allow the legal team to quickly target high value data.
Compliance Portal

Fusion's robust legal hold compliance portal gives employees who may possess relevant information (custodians) a high level of involvement in the legal hold process. A holistic, systematic approach to legal hold management permits custodians a sense of ownership over each stage, making it easy to manage and comply with hold requests, from inception to release.

The portal provides custodians with a single platform from which to view and manage all the legal holds to which they are a party (cross-matter holds). Custodians, once placed on a hold, can log in to the compliance portal from the hold notice itself or access via an intranet link, using a simple, single user name and password (single sign-on).
IT Portal IT professionals have the ability to access data maps via an intranet link for efficient data preservation and production. Fusion's IT portal provides records information managers and IT professionals (data stewards) with a dashboard view of the non-custodial data sources (NCDS), along with an easily accessible and cross-referenced list of record types and their associated retention policies. Managers can see an account of systems on legal hold and easily manage tasks and review and acknowledge holds via the portal. Data stewards can quickly update their company's data map through the portal.
Interview Within Fusion, users can compose interview questions, create and apply interview templates, send inquiries to custodians, and track and catalog responses. When a custodian fails to respond, the solution will automatically escalate the messaging according to your legal team's specifications.
Seamless Integration With Existing Tools And Technology From legal hold issuance to data collection and production, Fusion seamlessly integrates with existing discovery workflow management tools, and can be easily and painlessly configured to your organization's specific needs. Fusion offers out-of-the-box, proven connectors to all major HR and SSO systems. Fusion is able to communicate, integrate and authenticate with major LDAP systems.
European Union Privacy Concerns

Fusion includes the ability to adapt to European Union privacy requirements within its framework. Legal teams can circulate questionnaires to EU-based employees to determine if they have relevant information and obtain permissions for participations in the hold process. The flexible interview format allows legal teams to avoid asking employees to disclose information that violates EU privacy laws. Via Fusion's compliance portal, custodians can view cross-matter holds and may withdraw from the hold remotely.

Fusion's built-in security features allow legal teams to methodically manage custodian lists to protect identities and privacy, and avoid exposing notice recipient names to all recipients or to other parties. Self-collection tools allow employees to collect their own e-mail, desktop and shared documents and upload it themselves.


Fusion Genome           
FusionGo                   
Views from the Bench
"[a] party's discovery obligations do not end with the implementation of a "litigation hold" - to the contrary, that's only the beginning. Counsel must oversee compliance with the litigation hold, monitoring the party's efforts to retain and produce the relevant documents."
- Judge Scheindlin