Legal Hold Management in 4 Simple Steps
When it comes to legal hold management, a basic formula applies, just like it does in any other system:
Ask any process engineer: Even the simplest and most linear procedure is subject to human error if it’s done manually and repeated over and over.
But the more complex it gets, the greater the risk; not only are more errors made, but people find themselves overwhelmed by the volume of tasks they have to accomplish. The process becomes riddled with lapses and incompletions, cut corners and compromises.
Legal holds are complex processes based on simple tasks. They can be among the most complicated, expansive, and detailed operations for a legal team. Unfortunately, they’re comprised of exactly the type of tedious and repetitive tasks spawning human error. The more legal holds an in-house legal department has to execute, the greater the chance of slips and oversights.
That likelihood is compounded by another fact of life in the legal profession: stress. It causes mistakes in nearly any profession, and the stress of executing a legal hold won’t be alleviated by outmoded manual or ad hoc processes and inadequate technical tools.
It’s possible to streamline the entire legal hold management process, though. The right legal hold software solution can help users reach a kind of Legal Ops Valhalla, where executing a legal hold is simplified to four key steps.
Streamlining legal hold management (the SaaS way)
Legal departments are turning to legal tech to update and accelerate core operations, from matter management to executing NDAs, and legal hold management is no exception.
Beyond the need to make legal holds more accurate and defensible, there are costs involved that mount up over a course of a single, traditionally-executed legal hold. Beyond the topline costs of hiring outside counsel to conduct document inquiries and custodian interviews, in-house staff time and more, there are hidden costs as well.
All told they can drive up the tab for a manually-executed legal hold so that even a relatively modest one can cost a million dollars or more.
A best-of-breed legal hold management SaaS solution (like Mitratech’s own LegalHold) can supply an intuitive, easy-t0-use tool for end-to-end management of the process. That facilitates defensible mitigation of litigation risk and improved outcomes.
In a new infographic, we’ve laid out the issues with conventional legal holds and the ways in which legal hold management software can solve them by standardizing legal hold execution to four steps:
- Create a legal hold using predefined templates and notifications, so standardization is forced on the process from the very start.
- Accurately select the right custodians through integration with your HR directory, matching the data and documentation in need of preservation with the individuals who are accountable for it.
- Automatically execute a hold via automatic notifications, and follow that up with automated escalations if custodians fail to attest, all without devouring the time and attention span of your legal staff.
- Instantly report on results so you can demonstrate the reasonable steps that are part of a defensible process, by generating those reports in a fraction of the time as before.
Download and share the infographic, A 4-Step Solution to Managing a Legal Hold Process
