Legal Hold Confirmation Portal

Download a printable version of the Legal Best Practices Checklist here. You run a report to monitor the overall progress of the block, and your lawyers monitor the number of people who responded to your communications. Based on this information, you set the automatic reminder for custodian banks that do not respond or forward the reminders to the director of a custodian bank. When it comes to ensuring that all custodians comply with their custody obligations, consistent oversight is crucial. In addition to regular reminders and requests for regular confirmation of retention commitments, compliance training, where the negative consequences of non-compliance are clearly defined, can be an effective tool to ensure compliance. While there are no specific legal requirements for the structure or content of a legal retention notice, there are certainly a number of best practices you can follow when designing a legal hold. If data is lost, you should have hard evidence of preservation efforts. Setting up a legal lock is an essential first step, but you also want to show that the lock actually reached the relevant custodians (and more importantly, that they understood their obligations at that time). Always ask custodians to acknowledge receipt of the legal retention notice and continue it consistently until they do. When evaluating legal hold software, look for a solution that meets these requirements: without a well-defined process, legal retention periods can become a quagmire of spreadsheets, nervous managers, and accidentally deleted email responses. Learn how to overcome the most common legal challenges. Relativity Legal Hold is Relativity`s integrated solution for a complete application of the legal custody management workflow. Legal Hold helps you identify and retain relevant data when anticipating litigation.

A better understanding of your organization`s data structure, which gives you an edge in preparing for a suspension, responding to a regulator, or negotiating with opposing lawyers with Relativity Legal Hold. While it is good practice to have email templates and a streamlined process for issuing a legal hold as efficiently as possible, a notice of legal hold should be a thoughtful document tailored to the needs of each case. You must ensure that your legal retention process and technology are able to record and report the following details for individual cases and custodians: To make the legal hold process as defensible as possible, track each action consistently, such as emails sent, confirmations received, follow-ups, etc. We will come back to this in more detail later. Once your legal retention notice has been distributed, ask recipients to acknowledge receipt of the notice and understand their retention obligation. This can be tracked through an email response or by adding a special link to your email that recipients can simply click to confirm that they understand and comply with legal retention requirements. This option is generally only available for legal retention software. Legal blockages stem from a customary duty to avoid the looting of evidence.

This duty extends to the year 1722 and the case of Armory v. Delamirie, a dispute between a young chimney sweep and a goldsmith about a piece of jewelry found. Since then, robbery prevention requirements have slowly evolved over hundreds of years of case law, eventually leading to today`s legal retention requirements. In the context of legal stays, your primary goal should be to create an arguable process, which means that your appeal, judge, jury or regulator will deem it appropriate and thorough enough. While perfection is not required, your actions should be appropriate given the information available at the time of action. A legal suspension, also known as a litigation suspension, is the process by which organizations retain potentially relevant information when litigation is pending or reasonably expected. By issuing a legal freeze, organizations inform custodian banks of their obligation not to delete ISAs or physical documents relevant to a case. Your legal withholding process is not complete if it does not contain provisions to release the holdback when the withholding obligation has expired. A legal hold notice allows your organization to resume its normal retention policies and schedules, and allows administrators (internal and external vendors) to resume their usual workflows without fear of looting. The following is an example of a legal suspension notice from the Association of Corporate Counsel. In this insightful webinar, Lindsay Kolar, Corporate Paralegal at Gordon Food Service, discusses the 6 most common challenges facing the legal department and how to successfully address them with the right processes and tools.

The short answer is yes. Of course, companies have an obligation to identify the main custodians and ensure that they retain their data. But duty often goes even further. Designated parties may also be responsible for ensuring that non-parties subpoenaed or otherwise notified, including employees, also comply with the terms of the relevant statutory retention periods. This may include, for example, determining employees` personal devices. This becomes all the more difficult as the larger an organization is, the longer a legal ban lasts. Both when determining the initial custodians and when reassessing the scope of a legal suspension, you should consider possible changes in the employee`s status, such as leave, promotions, new roles, etc. Solution: It is important to work closely with your HR team to review custodians and be informed of significant changes throughout the legal retention period. A great way to stay up to date on relevant changes in deposit account status is to use legal custody software that integrates with your employee database or employee management system. Before installing and using Relativity Legal Hold, the Hold administrator must collect certain information.

This information is used when you set up relative legal holds, emails, and retention locks. See required links below. When releasing a statutory retention obligation, it is important to check whether the disclosed information or custodians are not subject to different retention obligations due to another legal retention obligation. A robust and centralized tracking system for all legal retention periods is essential in this regard. Lift your handles easily and easily when data no longer needs to be retained. Therefore, a legal preservation procedure and the use of a tool specific to legal retention are essential to demonstrate justifiable and bona fide efforts to preserve evidence. The legal retention notice is the notice sent to all custodians informing them that they are pending and indicating what information should be retained. This is an important part of the legal withholding process, which we will discuss in more detail later. To better understand all the stages and lifecycle of a legal hold, see the diagram below (click image for a larger view): There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to legal retention policies for businesses.

Each organization needs to find the procedures that best suit its specific characteristics, such as industry, data architecture, retention policies, organizational hierarchy, etc. Once your team has identified the main pending actors and the legal embargo period has expired, close your ban in legal retention. All information remains accessible for possible future audits. Once you have identified an event that triggers an obligation to retain potentially relevant ISIs, you should ensure that you issue a legal retention period as soon as possible. But before you can even write and distribute a legal retention notice, you need to determine a few things: However, if properly developed and implemented, a legal retention policy can greatly improve the organization`s ability to meet and meet its retention obligations. The key is to keep everyone informed of their role in the organization`s compliance obligations to minimize the risks associated with litigation. A verbal threat of litigation may trigger retention, but only a verbal block notice is not considered «reasonable measures» to actually preserve relevant information. To be sure, write it down. Not everyone who reads your embargo period is a lawyer. The purpose of a statutory retention obligation is to ensure that custodians comply with their obligation to retain relevant data.

Make sure your communication is not full of legal language, the specific information that needs to be kept, including details of the names and dates of the documents, and provides relevant examples of custodian banks. Finally, it is also important to document when the lock was released and why (i.e. what was the event that rendered the retention unnecessary?). Models are an important feature of Relativity Legal Hold. With templates, you can automate the creation of communication and retention management settings based on your organization`s policies. Relativity Legal Hold uses project templates and communication templates. Relativity Legal Hold is installed with a default template that can be customized to meet your needs. Additional templates can be created based on your suspension policies. For more information, see RelativityOne Hold and Collect Workspace Model. Litigation is expensive. Your legal hold software shouldn`t be.

You are the lead counsel to your company`s general counsel and, unfortunately, your company will be identified in future legal litigation. According to your company`s established legal retention policy, it is your duty to identify and retain all data for a potential investigation. You should start by informing individuals of their need to participate in the upcoming legal retention obligation and identify any device on which relevant information is stored. While it`s common to think of legal holds as the notification sent to custodians to preserve information, the legal hold process actually involves several steps: When exactly should you issue a legal suspension? Who should lead them to improve your own legal retention process? Learn 7 easy-to-use strategies for a defensible maintenance process.