Name: See How Enterprise Legal Teams Are Building Defensible Hold Programs
Uploaded: 2026-09-30T17:01:12.353Z
Duration: 23 min 8 s
Description: See How Enterprise Legal Teams Are Building Defensible Hold Programs

Transcript for "See How Enterprise Legal Teams Are Building Defensible Hold Programs": thank you all for joining. So here at Mitratech, we certainly understand when litigation hits, manual processes can create serious exposure from missed custodians, undocumented decisions, and spoliation risk can result in sanctions. So we really appreciate you joining Dave Dreier and myself, Corey Brett, again, for a live walk through of Mitratech legal hold application. What you'll see today, you'll see a full end to end demonstration of a hold life cycle, compliant whole creation, administration. You'll see what custodians can see, what they can do. Defensible analytics and reporting will also be shown. So we ask, don't wait for litigation to find the gaps in your process today. Let's leave today with a clear path to a defensible legal hold program. So quick agenda for today. We already went through the welcome and the introductions. We will have a few poll questions to kick us off, followed by the demonstration and q and a. Also, feel free to put your questions in the chat. Dave and I will try to watch those as we go throughout the CU webinar today. Awesome. Thanks, Corey. Just a couple slides and I'm gonna jump in the live software for everybody. And, again, if you have questions, please throw them in the q and a area. But just for a high level, for those who aren't familiar with the legal hold, a legal hold is an official directive you get when there is potential litigation coming to stop the destruction and or deletion of data. And there's a process that's typically required around that where you, one, you need to identify that there is potential litigation. So with whatever manner you have in your organization to, you know, determine there is potential litigation that's coming either initiated by you or initiated by someone else against you. Then the legal whole process takes off where you need to notify the affected individuals. You need to draft and issue notices to them, typically through email is the way it's done these days. The process typically requires that you have some sort of acknowledgment process where they acknowledge receiving those notices and also their intent to comply with the directives of that notice. And then there's other components in some of these you may or may not opt into too well. That's typically the bare minimum, but then there is the preservation of data. That's often, the custodians themselves as well as your administrative folks to actually do that and preserve and not delete that data. There are systematic ways you can prevent that from happening besides, you know, the familiar make everybody raise their right hand and, acknowledge that they will not preserve and or they will preserve and not delete the data. In some cases, organizations will then have interviews with their custodians based on their acknowledgment and just to confirm some of the information and the data that they are preserving. Once everything's done and litigations happen and that, you know, appropriate time has passed, you can release that litigation hold so people can then start, manipulating their data as needed. But, typically, that's, you know, after the litigation has been settled and everything's, closed out. And then throughout the process, there is tracking and reporting you'll do. That's where we get into using a system, a solution to help you manage that process. Mitratech Legal Hold is one of those. And, obviously, Corey and I both think it's the best one that's out there. And the reasons you wanna do this is there are potential risks and exposures if you don't follow this process. There are fines and, judgments that can be made against you. There, are numerous risks out there in the market of different, fines and judgments that organizations have had when they have not properly done this. Using a solution like ours will help you stay in compliance with the process and avoid those negative, implications. And, also, using a solution like ours will help you be defensible. Not only do you follow the process as you should, you're able to prove that you did and show that to the court, to opposing counsel as needed. In the middle, important, maybe not as important as, you know, minimizing your risk, but streamlining your process. Number of you notified on the poll that you currently use in manual processing, tracking of spreadsheets. There are automated better automated solutions, and I'll show you some of that too to make it easier for you to ensure consistency and reduce the cost of your time to do all this. And then lastly, you you know, depending on what you have as far as matter management solutions and ediscovery tools to actually collect and prepare that data, our legal hold solution can integrate with those to have a nice ecosystem of all the data you're working with and, make the entire process, not just the legal hold, but all of your matter of management, a nice streamlined process. So I'm gonna get into a little bit of sharing the software right now so we can take a quick look in the next, 15 of Mitratech solution for managing legal holds. So I'm going to share my screen. It takes a second to come up. There we go. This is Mitratech legal hold. It is a web based application accessible from your laptop or desktop browser, from tablets if you needed. A great deal of it can even be accessed from a mobile device, and the screen will resize to fit, some of the smaller devices. As you can see right now, I'm logged in as a system administrator, so I have access to the entire suite of the solution, including settings and templates and managing users and groups. In your organization, you may expose only certain parts of these even to your administrative team and lock down and can manage settings and templates and just allow other users to manage the holds themselves, initiate holds. And then your custodians will have very limited access. They will have the my holds area where they can just see the holds that they're a party to and they need to respond to. Solution works great for very small organizations. I noticed in the poll that a lot of you indicated you were on the low end, zero to 25 holds, per per year that you may be managing. While there were some that issued many, we have organizations that are in that small sweet spot of 25 or so holds that they're managing, and we have organizations that have thousands of them that they're managing. The solution is designed to work with either organization through the use of templates and guiding you. So whether you're in here every day or whether you're in here only once in a while, it's gonna be a good fit for you. So what I'm gonna do jump into is I'm not gonna go through all the settings and things. I'm gonna jump into manage holds, and I'm gonna look at one of my active holds right now. So here's the template of all the holds that are going on. I'm gonna pick up one, and it's actually one of my unset ones. So let me jump back real quick. Different areas for different holds that we're working on. There we go. When we get into managing the hold initiating it, there's a ribbon guiding you through the process. I'm not gonna stop at every one of these, but you can see there's information about the hold itself, certain demographic information which may come from your vendor management solution, streamlining that process for you. The legal staff, people who are managing this hold and have access rights to it in the administrative tool. The hold notice is where I'm gonna stop for a second, and the ribbon will stay there as we go along. This is where you manage that message, who it's coming from. We can integrate to your email solution. So the emails look like they're coming from your email servers, and, actually, we can route them through your email servers, or you can route them through our solution right here, whatever works best for your organization. But you wanna try and avoid spam, so we give you those tools to do that. Some different settings, the message that's going out, template driven. So we have options here to copy from templates. Some of our organizations have one and only template that they use for all their holds. Large organizations may have multiple templates depending on the type of matter, depending on geography. All this will help you streamline the process. And then there's some settings going on is, with regard to whether you want reminders and escalations. Definitely should want the solution to automate that for you when your custodians get these messages and they don't respond in a timely manner. Let the solution do the reminding for you and kick off reminders. And if they still don't respond, let it escalate to their supervisor. Other options too, let the custodians know who the other custodians are, that questionnaire. If you wanna do follow-up questionnaires with your individuals, an and integration to Microsoft three sixty five. So when we kicked off holds, we can actually integrate to Microsoft and automatically enable that preservation that I mentioned, lock down their email box, their OneDrive, SharePoint sites, team sites, whatever that may be. And then we'll jump onto the recipients tab. The next step, we've got the message sent. Who are we sending it to? This is where our legal hold solution can integrate with your HR solution or active directory to get a list of all the folks in your organization. So when you're creating a hold, you just add a group and say, you know what? This is for the employment team or people in research and development. You'll build the list of all the custodians who will be getting this message. You have options for silent custodians, people who are being held and we're preserving their data, but they may not know it, particularly in an employment matter. This could be very important. And then lastly, that set of what I spoke about Microsoft's three sixty five integration. The ability to automatically put place that preservation so data cannot be destroyed in mailboxes, OneDrives, team sites, and even noncustodial sites in SharePoint. Couple of other stops, that follow-up questionnaire that I'm watching our time. Once we send this whole through the custodian, and I'll show you how to acknowledge it in just a moment. In addition to having them acknowledged, do we also wanna ask some follow-up questions? Do you know of other individuals who should be on this hold? Do you track any social networking on your PC? And if they answer yes, which social networking sites do you use? All good robust information that can help feed your process, make sure you're preserving the right data, but also make sure you're pulling and asking the right questions of your custodians. I'm gonna skip preservation notice and data stewards. That's the process where you can send messages not just to the custodians, but to your administrative team, telling them they need to do some things. We need to go lock down SharePoint or not SharePoint, but, Salesforce or Jira or different environments you may have where it takes an administrator to preserve that data. You can send those notices. But I wanna stop very quickly here where I've got my reminders and escalation set up every week. 03:00 in the morning on Monday, people who have not acknowledged this hold will get an email reminder. And if after two of those, they don't respond, their supervisor will get notified. And if you wanna pull out a really big hammer, if after a couple more notifications to the supervisor, we still don't get any acknowledgment, we can send a notification to the supervisor's supervisor. I know of only one of our clients using that, extreme measure, but it's available to you. And then lastly, before you send out this hold, a quick recap. I've got workflow on this one. I've got it set up where Corey actually has to approve it before I can send out the hold. Here's a recap of the message I'm gonna be sending and what's gonna happen when I kick this off. We're gonna send it off to 15 recipients, preservation notice to one of those data stewards and four different system owners, letting me know I've got two silent custodians who will not be notified, and then we'll add those preservations in place to their Microsoft as well. So quick process. We actually couple years ago, we hired somebody new in our team, gave him a quick demonstration, and let him loosen the solution and told him to set up some holds. He got it down to about a three minute process, Taking advantage of the templates and the ribbon guiding him, it can be a very efficient process for you to make sure you're fully in compliance and doing all the things you need to. Then I'm gonna jump in real quick. I promised the custodian, take an email message delivered right to their inbox, whether they're using Google, Microsoft Outlook, or whatever other email tool they have. And my Outlook is frozen here. Well, that's not good. Give me one second. I'm gonna go back to my other browser, make sure things are here we go. Here's that email message using your template, your language. They click on a button to respond to the hold notice. They can do this on their phone, on their tablet, on their laptop, whatever it may be. They acknowledge the message. I received this message. I acknowledge it. I agree that I will preserve the data. They see a quick list of who the other custodians are. They continue on, and then there's that follow-up questionnaire that I mentioned where you can ask some other questions, and they'll submit that all. And the beauty of this is the process to initiate this hold is all automated. The process to send these off, and then through my software, through the solution, I have a dashboard showing me all the holds that are out there that I'm managing at the current time. Who's been responding, who hasn't responded, Who's acknowledged in the affirmative? Who's acknowledged in the negative? Silent custodians and any released custodians I've got. And if I wanna look at the details of who those people are, for example, that have not yet responded, I can see those individuals right here. Send them another ad hoc reminder. Respond on their behalf. Maybe somebody's out on leave. We give you a lot of tools to acknowledge the hold on behalf of individuals and then eventually release the hold and finish up the process as needed. And then lastly, we've got the online dashboard here, reporting. Sometimes you need to generate reports and send them off to other individuals. Our legal hold solution includes some standard out of the box reports. There's currently nine of them that you can generate. We've also got a custom report designer. There's a very unique and specific report you wanna generate. You can configure that, set that up, schedule it for automatic distribution as well. And if you're fully integrated with our matter management solution, Team Connect or a different solution, we can feed data back to that solution so people can monitor what's going on with the legal holds right from your matter management solution. So just a quick walk through of our legal hold solution. Hopefully, this was helpful. I'm gonna stop my screen sharing. We'll go back to where we can see, the different things and also monitor the chat and see if anybody had anything coming through as far as questions in the chat. Perfect, Dave. Thank you for the demonstration. Group, what can we help clarify following that demonstration? What questions do you have? Feel free to just put them in the chat window or jump off the mic if you can. Alright. Looks like one came in. Where do legal holds break down today? Custodian identification, employee changes, follow-up reminders, IT preservation, reporting, or handoffs into eDiscovery? I think it's an excellent question, Corey. I'll I'll take a stab at it. You know, interestingly, I think a lot of it, it breaks down. It's just that letting the the legal team know that there's pending litigation out there. There's you know? And that's where it's not necessarily the legal hold solution you're working with, but being able to track your matters as well in an organized solution, being able to track when things come in, working with your service or process vendor. I think the other big thing is, especially in in organizations that don't have a solution like this, it's that acknowledgment process, monitoring it, making sure people are acknowledging, and having the automated reminders. I think that's, you know, one of the the biggest quick wins you can get out of a solution like ours is, letting the automation take over. Once we've sent out that hold, letting it keep track of who's responded, let it remind the people who haven't, because that's that's an important part. It's you're not compliant and defensible if you just send out the notifications, and you don't have a process to keep track of who's acknowledged them, and who's actually doing the things. So that's that's my personal 2¢ on that one. Great. Looks like we have a couple more questions that popped in. Thank you, Dave. Mhmm. Can you tell me again what tab the toggle buttons for SharePoint, Teams, etcetera, is under? I don't see that in my legal hold, but it could be an admin setting. That that definitely is an administrative setting. So you need to be you need to, through setup, a couple things. One, tell the legal hold solution that you want to integrate with Microsoft and have that integration. And then there is some setup because we do need permissions to automatically communicate with the Microsoft environment. That's where you're probably gonna have to do some work with your Microsoft team because, you'll have to set up some some authentication protocols and configuration in there to make sure that we can communicate and send these holds off to that one. So it may just need a quick call you need to make with your a sit down with your Microsoft team, check off the right setting, and then get some authentication parameters from them to, set it up. Alright. Thank you, Dave. Yep. We're gonna keep you busy here. Excellent. Are the o three sixty five data sources, Exchange OneDrive, etcetera, are these automatically configured? Yeah. Once you do the initial setup of we want to communicate with Microsoft, put in the right authentication parameters, you're automatically gonna have the options to, put those preservations on mailboxes, OneDrive on a custodian by custodian basis, Microsoft Teams channels they're involved with, and then also, SharePoint. If SharePoint's in your environment, you'll be able to build a list of different SharePoint sites, non custodial sites, team sites, things like that, that you'll be able to pick from also on a hold by hold basis. Excellent. Thank you. There's another one in here. Does legal hold send the email notifications itself, or does it route them through the client's email servers? That is entirely an option that you have. A lot of our organizations, especially smaller ones, will have the legal hold solution set it up. And, actually, that's how it is in my demo environment. It's just the the legal hold, servers will send the email notifications, SMTP email notifications. A lot of large organizations, even medium sized ones, prefer to have the emails routed through your own servers because that provides an extra level of protection from being trapped by spam. So if that email is coming not just with, you know, a from address and a reply to address that's are your email domains, but if it's actually coming from your email server, it's it's much safer with regard to, not getting trapped by spam. So you have the option to do either or. Alright. Excellent. Here's another one. Apologies if we covered this before. But do you have APIs to integrate with products outside of Microsoft Suite? Definitely. Yeah. The our legal hold solution has a a full API, bidirectional. So whether it's writing data into our legal hold solution, which is used to perform a lot of our migrations and and the different things we do, But we also have integrations that can feed data out so that we can communicate with any discovery sites or a different site, maybe for your HR integration, where you're pulling your your users and groups from that. So we've got a a good number of customers that are taking advantage of those APIs. In some cases with our team, but we've also got full documentation on them as well. Alright. Excellent. Looks like there's one more in here. If we have it preserved if we have it preserving all emails, is that sufficient, or do we need to still inform the employees to stop deletions? Typically, part of the process is even with the automation, you still wanna notify the custodians that it's happening, because there may be other things that they have that you wanna make sure they handle themselves, some files on their own hard drive, mobile text, and things like that. So Microsoft is one part of all the data that may be relevant to different litigation you're facing. So there there may be some data sources you have that aren't Microsoft, that aren't done with an integration to another internal solution where you need that custodian involvement and that acknowledgment from them that they will participate in the preservation as well, so that you're fully covered. K. Thank you. Yep. There's another one. How is the solution priced? By number of users, holds. You're correct. Number of holds. So it's the average number of matters with open holds throughout a year. It looks like we have one more. So sometimes we've have heard from customers who want to send a periodic reminder to custodians of holds that they're on. How would legal hold handle this? I didn't mention it, but we have that built in. So there are those, I like to call them the noncompliant reminders of people who haven't acknowledged that's done all through the automation there. You will also have the ability to set up, a completely independent periodic reminder. Some of our clients do it every three months, every six months, whatever it may be, letting them know here's what holds you're currently on. And it may be a situation where they've acknowledged and responded to all of them, but you can still send that periodic reminder just giving them keeping them updated of here's what we have as far as open holds that you're on right now. So you can do those as well. Excellent. Thank you, Dave. Yeah. Sure. Alright. We have two minutes left. We're gonna close out today's webinar with initially, we'd love to share this assessment checklist, with the group. Feel free to scan the QR code. It'll ask you a few questions and give you steps in this process to help begin your legal hold, technology journey. I'll give everybody a couple of seconds now to scan the screen.