Relativity Legal Hold is Relativity's integrated solution for a complete legal hold management workflow application. Legal Hold helps you identify and preserve relevant data when you anticipate litigation. Better understand your organizational data structure, which gives you an advantage in preparing for a hold, responding to a regulatory agency, or negotiating with opposing counsel with Relativity Legal Hold.
Instead of sending ad hoc emails and manually tracking responses in spreadsheets to manage a legal hold, you can centralize this process by using one application. Using Legal Hold, you can:
- Send out hold notifications by email to confirm involvement.
- Interview custodians to gather information.
- Automatically follow up with unresponsive custodians.
- Track and analyze responses using the Relativity Pivot feature.
- Generate reports to maintain a defensibly-sound audit trail of all communications with custodians and other relevant parties.
Relativity Legal Hold is available in the application library and is upgraded with each Relativity upgrade. Install Relativity Legal Hold to your workspace from the application library.
This guide outlines Legal Hold's structure and functionality and describes how to create, manage, assess, and close a legal hold or hold-related project.
Read a Legal Hold scenarioYou're the lead attorney in your company's general counsel and unfortunately, your corporation is identified in an upcoming litigation. Per your company's established legal hold policy, it's your duty to identify and preserve all data for the potential investigation. You need to start notifying people of their required participation in the upcoming legal hold and start identifying all devices storing pertinent information.
To do this, you create a project in Legal Hold, then you add people to associate them to the hold, and create/assign communications and questionnaires to that project. As you add people, you create roles for them to differentiate between departments as the hold processes. For example, you need to involve the IT department to help identify hardware and the HR department to help identify persons of interest.
Once you associate employees with your hold, your attorneys use your project to send an initial hold communication that requires each employee to acknowledge their participation in the hold. You've also included a questionnaire in the notice, which asks relevant questions about the employee's starting employment date, their supervisor, and what company machines they use most frequently and for what purpose. This helps your team identify what level of involvement each employee has in the litigation. You keep track of all individual responses in the Mailbox tab in and send follow-up communications as necessary, informing the employee that they are no longer needed in the legal hold, or that you need more information for the litigation.
You run a report to monitor the overall progress of the hold and your attorneys monitor how many people have responded to your communications. Based on this information, you set automatic reminder to non-responsive custodians, or escalate the reminders to a custodian's manager.
Once your team has identified the key players in the hold and the actual legal hold period is over, you close your hold in Legal Hold. All of the information remains accessible for potential future audits.
Note: You can locate an application's version number by navigating to Applications & Scripts > Application Library tab. You must be a system admin to access this tab.
