LAWTECH GURU BLOG by Jeff Beard

Free ILTA White Paper: Best Practices for the Legal Hold Process

I'm honored that ILTA asked me to contribute a white paper on best practices for legal holds.  It's a topic near and dear to my heart, as I advise companies seeking to implement more effective hold policies and procedures.  The legal hold process is a critical stage in eDiscovery.  Implementing and executing a well-designed legal hold process can significantly reduce the risks and costs associated with eDiscovery and other compliance requirements.

Crafting, adopting and implementing legal hold best practices often raises the following questions:

• When is our legal obligation to preserve information triggered?
• Where is all of our data relating to this matter?
• How should we notify people of the need to preserve their information?
• Who needs to be notified?
• How much or how little information do we need to preserve?
• How can we best preserve and collect the data to meet our legal obligation?
• When should we rely upon custodian self-selection of data to preserve, and when is it more appropriate to follow a different procedure?
• When can we dispose of the information preserved subject to the legal hold?

You can download a PDF reprint here at LTG, which answers these increasingly important questions along with examples from recent key eDiscovery case decisions.

I also recommend downloading and reading the full white paper collection, made possible by the combined efforts of ILTA's Litigation Support, Records Management and Law Department Peer Groups.  There are a number of great contributions on the subject which many should find quite helpful:

Litigation Support: Document Forensics and Legal Holds
Articles included in this white paper:
- Overcoming Data Encryption for Forensic Imaging and Collections
- When is Full-Blown Forensic Collection Necessary?
- When "Deleted" Doesn't Mean "Gone"
- Disaster Recovery or Discovery Disaster?
- Legal Hold and Subpoena Compliance Coordination
- Best Practices for Legal Hold Processes
- The Effects of Litigation Holds on the Corporate Lawyer

I frequently hear that what keeps GC's and AGC's awake at night is their legal hold preservation and collection process, or lack thereof along with the fear of sanctions for spoliation and other discovery violations.  If your organization has issues with its legal hold and other discovery processes or you'd like to know how you can improve their repeatability and defensibility while reducing cost and risk, please contact me via either the e-mail link on this blog or the e-mail address in the white paper.  I'd be happy to discuss.