End-to-End Legal Hold Manager

The Challenge

A recent study by Bayer Consulting found that 30% of the companies surveyed did not have a formal legal hold policy or legal hold notification and enforcement capabilities for preserving evidence for eDiscovery. With the inability to perform, manage and audit legal hold to prevent spoliation, companies are at significant risk.

Legal hold or litigation hold is the methodology an organization must follow to preserve electronically stored information (ESI) according to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) when litigation has been initiated or is reasonably anticipated. Legal hold is straightforward in theory; however in practice, it can become a complex record keeping exercise as the number of custodians and cases increase. Legal hold management cannot be solved by people and process alone. It requires technology for reliability, consistency, and repeatability.

The Solution

Kazeon’s Legal Hold Manager powered by KazHoldTM technology improves FRCP compliance and automates the legal hold process by delivering a comprehensive, end-to-end legal hold management capability. Legal Hold Manager seamlessly integrates into Kazeon’s eDiscovery suite to provide legal hold management throughout the eDiscovery process. Its robust capabilities include Legal Hold Notification, Legal Hold Identification & Dashboard, Legal Hold Analytics & Reporting, Legal Hold Policy, Legal Hold Enforcement, Legal Hold Release, and Legal Hold Workflow & Automation. Kazeon’s Legal Hold Manager fills the technology void by allowing corporations to cost-effectively implement, manage, and audit the legal hold process.

1. Legal Hold Notification

Legal Hold Notification delivers legal professionals the ability to easily notify custodians of a litigation or potential litigation. Integrated with Kazeon’s eDiscovery suite, Legal Hold Notification delivers the ability to create small or large custodian lists, customize notification messages, track receipts and acknowledgements, audit notifications, and manage notices across multiple cases. The browser-based graphical user interface delivers legal professionals an intuitive tool to easily manage notifications.

Kazeon’s Legal Hold Manager delivers the first real-time, end-to-end legal hold notification which documents the legal hold process and chain of custody through all stages of the EDRM model (identification, collection, culling, processing, analysis, review, and production). The end-to-end capability gives legal professionals the ability to enable policy tracking, auditing, and management throughout the eDiscovery workflow on a single enterprise-class, scalable eDiscovery suite to reduce risk exposure and mitigate litigation cost.

Once a legal hold notification is issued, the legal supervisor has two methods of securing potentially relevant information—In-Place Legal Hold and Target Legal Hold. In-Place Legal Hold implements a legal hold on the source repository, i.e. Laptop, Desktop, Email Server and/or File Share. It is useful for large data sets and large cases, as well as for quick analysis and review of early case assessments. Target Legal Hold stores data to a secure repository when data needs to be collected and alegal store is created.

2. Legal Hold Identification & Dashboard

Kazeon delivers your litigation team a single dashboard to view case status. The dashboard enables multiple views based on defined roles and permissions for legal supervisors, legal reviewers, and outside counsel. The legal supervisor can view all cases, reviewer progress, custodians, and documents, as well as set policy and permissions across all cases. The legal reviewers have a view into the case upon which they are working and all relevant ESI to be reviewed. The dashboard delivers the ability for outside counsel to securely log into the system and view the case they are assisting with. The Legal Hold Dashboard is the command center of the legal hold management solution.

Using the advanced SHA-1 hashing capability, Kazeon provides de-duplication on items being copied, collected, or placed on legal hold. Duplicate reports facilitate locating, deleting, or moving duplicates rapidly and securely. Removing duplicate documents reduces storage space and decreases legal review time.

Kazeon’s Analytics and Reporting

3. Legal Hold Analytics and Reporting

With robust analytics and reporting capabilities, Legal Hold Manager provides graphical analysis with interactive drilldown and chart rotation. The sophisticated graphical analysis view displays the composition and distribution of documents and emails returned from a search query or associated with an entire case. Reviewers can narrow the collection using dynamically populated filters to view the impact on the overall distribution. Direct drilldown from summary charts provides faceted navigation, while click-and-hold chart rotation allows users to view all segments of a pie chart.

Legal supervisors have the capability to view graphical reports on a case, and view all cases from the dashboard. This capability allows for quick assessment of all cases and their current status so the legal supervisor has the information needed to allocate reviewers as needed across multiple cases.

4. Legal Hold Policy

Kazeon’s Legal Hold Manager allows corporate legal teams to construct and implement legal hold, manage legal hold and enforce legal hold policies across the enterprise, custodians and content repositories. Once policies are set, Legal Hold Manager implements and enforces the policies, as well as delivers rich visual reports on ESI on legal holds across multiple cases.

5. Legal Hold Enforcement

With an end-to-end eDiscovery suite, once the corporate legal team sets the legal hold policies, the Kazeon solution with its hierarchical permissions and system auditing delivers the ability for enforcement and tracking of all policies. The analytics and graphical reporting features allow legal professionals to visualize the legal hold workflow, as well as drill down and view details by case, document type on hold, custodian, notification, date/time, concept, or other filters.

In implementing Legal Hold Manager, Kazeon offers in-place legal hold and legal hold to a secure target repository. In-place delivers the capability to quickly hold the potentially relevant information in-place (on the laptop, desktop or server) for near instant compliance until determination of relevance or the ESI is copied to a secure repository. Legal hold to secure target repository enables the legal professional to perform a copy or move with ESI integrity verification to a secure storage system for long-term retention of relevant documents.

Kazeon’s In-place Legal Hold and Target Legal Hold are features which can be used separately or together sequentially. Used together, Kazeon’s Legal Hold allows corporations to quickly freeze information in-place for initial assessment then securely copy only the relevant case information saving network bandwidth, processing time, and storage expense while ensuring that the evidence is protected.

Kazeon’s Legal Hold Auditing and Data Verification capabilities provide a defensible and auditable process that ensures no spoliation of evidence. The entire eDiscovery process within the Kazeon environment is audited and reported on to ensure user behavior is accurately tracked and accounted for. Any copy performed using Kazeon is verified by matching the unique thumbprint of the copy to the target to verify that they are identical.

6. Legal Hold Release

Initiating a legal hold is only half the battle. Releasing legal hold is the other. Kazeon’s Legal Hold Manager enables legal professionals to easily release ESI that has been on prior hold. With Legal Hold Manager’s flexibility, a legal supervisor can release a whole case, email thread, or individual documents with a single click of the mouse. The process of releasing a legal hold ensures that only a specific legal hold on a document or documents is released. A document could be held by multiple legal holds across multiple cases. Legal Hold Manager ensures that a release operation only releases the document(s) for the specific legal hold in question and not a univeral release.

7. Legal Hold Workflow & Automation

Legal Hold Workflow delivers legal professionals the ability to manage a case, cases, custodians, reviewer assignments, and custodians’ ESI. The dynamic graphical user interface with its rich visual reports enables legal supervisors to instantly inspect cases status and progression.

8. Scalable and High-Performance Architecture

Built on the award-winning Kazeon Information Management Platform, the Kazeon Legal Hold Manager integrates seamlessly into Kazeon’s eDiscovery suite. This integration delivers enterprise-class performance and scalability engineered to process hundreds of terabytes of electronically stored information efficiently and cost effectively.