7 Advanced Legal Hold Tips

It can be easy to become complacent with your legal hold process: It works and you’d rather focus on other areas in e-discovery. But like any high-functioning organizational process, building a great e-discovery program starts with ensuring you’re running “the basics” efficiently. The choices you make at the start of your e-discovery process (which begins with collection) will greatly affect how defensible, efficient, and expensive the successive activities will be. 

Definition of Legal Hold

But what do you do once your team has established strong foundational processes? How do you move forward and tighten processes even more—and what are the benefits to doing so? 

The Benefits of Establishing a More Mature Legal Hold Process

There are a couple primary benefits to building out a more robust, technologically-streamlined legal hold process.

• Efficiency. When your organization has a robust, defined legal hold process and the technology to support those efforts, a lot of the manual, repetitive work is gone. For example, if you’re used to sifting through different spreadsheets, emails, or other programs, funneling that work into one software program with a customized workflow is one of the fastest ways to improve your process right away. Legal holds are issued faster, the case moves forward at a quicker pace, and you’re able to spend more time doing more focused work.

• Defensibility. A more mature legal hold process means that you don’t have a mishmash of programs and processes that are thrown together, but rather a defined process that you can present to the court that showcases that your preservation is “reasonable,” and therefore defensible if ever questioned in court or by another party.

When you invest in a better process, you can expect better results. Predictable, transparent processes that everyone knows means you’re communicating between teams more effectively, and your resources and staff understand what you’re trying to accomplish at a given moment during the process.

By contrast, there are a couple things that can go badly wrong, as the two case law rulings in our report showcase, when your legal hold process is not mature and defensible.

In this whitepaper, we walk you through the benefits of establishing a more mature legal hold process, and give you 7 tips to help you leverage techniques and technologies to help automate, scope, and track your preservation activities—empowering you to gather case-pertinent information sooner and reduce your e-discovery expenditures.

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