Sync or Sink: Why Legal Hold Integration Is Key for Legal Ops in 2025
Which internal solutions and systems should your legal hold technology be integrated with?
Our data now resides across a wide variety of platforms — emails in Outlook, chat messages in Microsoft Teams, and files stored in cloud-based tools like OneDrive or SharePoint (to name just a few!).
For legal teams, preserving relevant data in response to litigation, regulatory inquiries, or investigations becomes even more daunting when systems aren’t connected.
Luckily, legal hold technology has also evolved far beyond its early days of manual tracking and cumbersome processes. Integrated legal hold technology addresses this challenge by creating a direct connection between these platforms and your legal hold solution. This connectivity ensures data is automatically identified, preserved, and tracked without manual intervention, reducing the risk of missed deadlines or overlooked information.
But which integrations should you be looking for in your legal technology, and where do you start?
Real-Life Applications of Legal Hold Integration
Integrated legal hold technology is transforming how organizations preserve data, coordinate across departments, and stay audit-ready in an increasingly complex regulatory environment. Some of the key systems and functionalities you should be looking for include:
- Email Integration (Outlook): Some legal hold systems can automatically preserve emails and attachments based on custodian or case criteria, ensuring no relevant data is willing or unwillingly deleted. Mitratech LegalHold, for example, integrates with Microsoft 365 Purview, automatically preserving a custodian’s email and Onedrive improving defensibility, preventing spoliation and and essentially eliminating the need to switch between applications to perform legal hold actions on emails and documents.
- Collaboration Tools (Teams): With integrations, chat histories, shared files, and other data are preserved seamlessly. This is crucial as workplace communications increasingly shift to real-time messaging platforms. As another example, Mitratech Legal Hold 3.6 now features improved M365 Teams Integration to avoid destruction of data and improve defensibility by automatically putting the custodians M365 Teams data sources on hold.
- File Storage (Non Custodial Sites): In more advanced legal hold solutions, files stored in cloud systems are automatically flagged and preserved, reducing the risk of accidental deletions during active legal holds. Mitratech LegalHold, for example, will soon allow for a simple integration where all non custodial Sharepoint and Teams sites can automatically be preserved in Microsoft Purview. Keep an eye out for this forthcoming feature!
- Internal Processes and Applications (Matter Management Software): When legal holds are initiated without direct visibility into ongoing matters, the chances of errors, missed deadlines, or lost data increase significantly. Integrating legal hold technology with matter management, on the other hand, ensures seamless coordination and a unified approach to handling legal obligations.
This integration links preservation efforts directly to specific matters, eliminating redundancies and reducing the risk of missed deadlines or errors. It also enhances visibility by providing a comprehensive view of data, compliance, and related workflows in a single system, empowering legal teams to make informed decisions.
For example, a direct integration with Mitratech’s Management Platform, TeamConnect, allows LegalHold users to:
- Initiate legal holds directly from within TeamConnect
- View and report on legal hold data and compliance rates using TeamConnect reporting tools
- Automatically update LegalHold if the matter scope changes
- Integrate with Single Sign-On (SSO)
- Automatically add data from custom fields in TeamConnect to legal hold notifications
- Send matter based security from TeamConnect to LegalHold ensuring private matter security between systems
Reporting is a particularly important benefit, as it allows users visual representations of their data via dashboards and high-level views of legal hold statuses within matters, giving a closer look at compliance traits like:
- The type of matters that have the most number of legal holds
- The jurisdictions with the most number of legal holds
- The attorneys with the most number of legal holds
- Which legal holds have the lowest compliance rates
- Overall trends to follow
Benefits of an Integrated Approach
Seamlessly legal hold integrations with tools like Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and other enterprise systems make application-switching an issue of the past. And to that end, the benefits are long-lasting:
- Centralized Reporting and Data Visualization: Access real-time dashboards and detailed reports to easily track the progress and compliance of all legal holds from a single platform.
- Increased Efficiency for Staff and Attorneys: Streamline tasks like issuing holds and tracking custodians, allowing legal teams to focus on higher-value, strategic work.
- Reduced Redundancy in Data Input: Eliminate repetitive data entry by automatically syncing information across integrated systems, saving time and reducing errors.
- Consistency in Reporting: Maintain standardized reporting formats across all legal holds, ensuring compliance and defensibility with uniform documentation.
- Alleviated Application Switching: Keep everything in one integrated system, reducing the need to toggle between multiple platforms, leading to smoother workflows and fewer distractions.
- Efficient Data Preservation: Automate the capture and preservation of data from various platforms, ensuring no critical information is overlooked.
- Improved Compliance: Stay on top of legal requirements with real-time tracking and automated reminders, minimizing the risk of missed deadlines or legal missteps.
- Streamlined Notifications: Automatically notify custodians through communication tools like email and Microsoft Teams, ensuring immediate action on legal holds.
- A More Defensible Process: Maintain a clear, defensible audit trail that documents every step of the legal hold process, providing strong protection during audits or litigation.
- Time Savings: Significantly reduce the time spent on manual legal hold processes by automating tasks such as issuing holds and monitoring compliance.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Foster smooth communication and collaboration between legal, IT, HR, and external counsel, with everyone working from the same, up-to-date data.
The Bottom Line: Why Legal Hold Integration is the Future of Legal Ops
Integrating your legal hold technology is no longer a nice-to-have — it’s a must. A seamless connection between legal holds and other enterprise systems makes everything run smoother, from preserving data to ensuring compliance. By cutting down on repetitive tasks, improving collaboration, and making reporting more efficient, your legal team can actually do more with less in 2025 and beyond. (But remember: seamless integration is only one of the key elements to look out for when buying legal hold technology!)
Looking ahead, we’ll see even more integration, automation, and AI transforming the way legal ops teams work, keeping the focus on agility and proactiveness. Now’s the time to sync your legal hold technology with the rest of your systems to stay ahead of the curve — and avoid sinking in a sea of litigation, investigation, or audits.
Learn about LegalHold
The SaaS solution for end-to-end legal hold process management.
