Activate the Hold:

Streamlining Legal Holds and Custodian Management with Precision

Legal hold implementation is a critical first step in any litigation or investigation; in fact, the need to do so can occur before the case is even filed or the investigation is even launched! Today, corporate legal teams must preserve data across a growing array of custodians and systems – all under tight deadlines and strict compliance requirements. It’s no surprise that tracking down dozens of custodians and navigating sprawling data environments is more challenging than ever.

That means it’s more important than ever to deploy repeatable, scalable, and defensible legal hold processes that can withstand scrutiny. In practice, this means establishing standardized workflows for issuing hold notices, capturing custodian acknowledgments, and monitoring compliance, so nothing falls through the cracks. The goal is a simplified yet defensible hold procedure – one that is automated where possible and thoroughly documented at every step. In this post, we’ll discuss how Elite Discovery enables legal teams to meet their preservation obligations with confidence, even as data volumes and custodians multiply.

Multi-Platform Integration Across Relativity, Reveal, and Everlaw

A key differentiator of Elite Discovery’s approach is its ability to operationalize legal holds across the industry’s leading eDiscovery platforms. Many organizations rely on platforms like Relativity, Reveal, or Everlaw to manage data; Elite Discovery works seamlessly within each of these environments to activate holds in the most effective way for that client. Here’s an example of each:

  • In RelativityOne, Elite can leverage the Relativity Legal Hold module to send out hold notifications and even perform in-place preservation on cloud data sources like Microsoft 365 or Slack.
  • In Everlaw, Elite helps clients use Everlaw’s integrated Legal Holds feature, which provides built-in tracking of custodian responses and auto-escalation of notices for non-responders.
  • And with the Reveal platform, clients gain the benefit of Reveal’s AI-powered legal hold toolkit to manage notices from issuance to release.

As a technology partner to all three major platforms, Elite Discovery stays at the forefront of what each can do. We’ve seen what these platforms can do to leverage AI and GenAI to streamline eDiscovery workflows. This multi-platform mastery means that regardless of a client’s preferred software, Elite can deploy a defensible hold process that takes full advantage of native features. The result is a consistent, scalable approach to legal holds – one that transcends any single platform and instead focuses on the outcome: preserved data and reduced risk of spoliation.

AI-Powered Custodian Data Insights

Modern eDiscovery platforms now come equipped with powerful analytics and AI capabilities, and Elite Discovery makes sure to put these platform-native AI tools to work for legal holds. One major challenge in custodian management is identifying where all the relevant data lives for each person under hold. Beyond obvious sources like email inboxes, custodians today generate data in team chat applications, cloud drives, business databases, and more. Elite addresses this by using AI-driven analysis to rapidly map custodian data sources and communications.

For example, Elite uses Reveal’s analytics and Brainspace technology can collect and analyze data sources across an enterprise, helping uncover meaningful insights about who has what information. Patterns in communication can be detected that point to important data repositories – perhaps AI finds that a particular custodian frequently exchanged files via a cloud storage link, indicating that repository should be included in the hold.

Advanced analytics can even flag anomalies or risk signals: RelativityOne, for instance, can follow conversations in their native format and detect suspicious behaviors (like off-hour communications or tampered files) that might warrant closer preservation efforts. By harnessing these capabilities, Elite Discovery can develop a rich picture of each custodian’s data footprint.

While these technologies streamline the workflows for identifying data to preserve, it’s important to work with a provider like Elite that not only understands the technical alternatives but also has the experience in how to leverage them to ensure a more complete and defensible preservation scope – all achieved in a fraction of the time it would take with manual methods.

Generative AI: From Hold Notices to Interview Summaries

While analytics help map the “what and where” of custodian data, GenAI is proving invaluable in streamlining the communications and documentation side of legal holds. Elite Discovery leverages GenAI to enhance several labor-intensive tasks, including drafting tailored hold notices, summarizing custodian interviews, and even predicting likely data sources based on past matters. These applications demonstrate GenAI’s versatility beyond document review, extending its benefits across the discovery lifecycle:

Drafting Tailored Hold Notices

Crafting a clear and case-specific litigation hold notice for each custodian is key to minimizing the risk of spoliation of data and eventual sanctions. The notice must instruct on exactly what data to preserve, often in non-technical language. Traditionally, teams relied on standardized templates and painstaking manual edits to cover the particulars of a new matter.

Today, GenAI can help jump-start this process. Using details about the case and the custodian, the AI can generate a draft hold notice that includes all necessary instructions and context, customized to the situation at hand. For example, if a matter involves a client’s Slack communications, the draft notice will explicitly tell custodians to preserve Slack chats, whereas another case’s notice might emphasize text messages.

Elite builds on this foundation by having GenAI dynamically tailor those templates – adjusting the tone, scope, and preservation list for each custodian without starting from scratch. The result is a well-formed notice in minutes, which the legal team can then quickly review, edit and finalize, saving substantial time while also promoting consistency and completeness in communications.

Summarizing Custodian Interviews

In a defensible legal hold process, sending notices is often just the beginning. Legal teams frequently conduct custodian interviews or questionnaires to dig deeper into what data each person may possess and where it’s stored. These interviews yield valuable insights, such as confirmation that a departing employee copied files to a USB drive, or that a manager’s text messages are relevant; however, summarizing and disseminating this information can be onerous.

With GenAI-driven summarization, after an interview or a questionnaire is completed, the conversation transcript or responses can be fed into a GenAI tool (with appropriate security controls) to produce a concise summary of key points, such as each custodian’s relevant data sources (e.g., “Custodian A uses personal Dropbox for work documents; Custodian B communicated via WhatsApp about Project X”) and any preservation steps already taken or needed. This process streamlines capturing critical details for easy reference. Importantly however, the process doesn’t replace human judgment – Elite still works with the legal team to review the summaries for accuracy. Elite leverages GenAI to support, not replace, legal practitioners, amplifying their ability to identify important facts and connections.

Intelligent Data Source Recommendations

One of the more novel ways Elite Discovery applies GenAI is in predicting likely data sources that should be preserved for a given matter. Combined with Elite’s years of experience (and general industry knowledge), a GenAI model can suggest, for example, that an employment litigation case often involves HR system databases and personal email accounts, or that a patent dispute might implicate source code repositories and design software. Elite takes it a step further by having GenAI leverage past matter insights to proactively flag data sources the legal team might otherwise overlook.

Combining AI-generated recommendations with years of award-winning expertise enables Elite to cast a preservation net with precision: wide enough to include all relevant data; yet targeted enough to avoid over-preserving trivial information. In eDiscovery, this balance is key: it controls downstream review costs while protecting the client from potential sanctions. Leveraging GenAI and other leading technologies effectively enables Elite Discovery to help clients strike that balance more easily.

Conclusion

“Activate the hold” is more than a catchy phrase – it’s a call to approach legal holds proactively and intelligently. In a world where legal teams are under pressure to “do more with less,” leveraging AI to streamline legal holds offers a powerful advantage. Elite Discovery’s use of platform-native AI and generative AI injects much-needed efficiency and precision into a traditionally challenging process, resulting in time saved and risks mitigated – factors that define success for any legal hold!

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