The process of preserving all forms of relevant information to potential litigation is one of the first, and most important, steps in any legal matter. Legal hold, as the process is commonly known, can be tedious and prone to human error when myriad stand-alone applications are used in conjunction with manual, legacy processes. With updates to the United States Federal Rules of Civil Procedure concerning electronically stored information (ESI), it is paramount that organizations implement a cohesive solution.
Andreas Mueller, vice president of forensic services at Advanced Discovery, recently discussed with Legaltech News the challenges of such an implementation. “One of the greatest challenges companies face is that a lot of related information resides in multiple platforms, virtual sources and physical locations,” Mueller explained. “Most of the time, processes and workflows depend on multiple tools, applications and/or platforms, to be properly managed. This certainly includes legal hold management. As a general rule, the lower the number of support tools or applications that are needed to manage a process, the higher the efficiency of such platforms becomes. Because of this simple principle, e-discovery solutions should have legal hold functionality as part of their core features.”
