Legal Hold Pro Overview
Legal Hold Pro is a software application designed for professionals involved in the critical stages of litigation and eDiscovery, enabling organizations to efficiently and effectively manage a legal hold. Whether responding to a lawsuit, government investigation, or an internal inquiry, Legal Hold Pro covers the spectrum of legal hold requirements. It is an essential software tool for both legal and HR professionals, as well as IT administrators, to ensure compliance and mitigate risk.
With a fully-featured pre-configured form, users generate custom legal hold notices and automatic escalation notices for custodians who fail to respond to the initial notice. Automatically generate a custodian Console so the custodian can track their communications. Use existing employee or customer rosters to streamline the legal hold process. Audit and track all actions against signed agreements and time-stamped notifications for every custodian involved in a legal hold. Leverage flexible custodian sets to manage complex holds with multiple parties, including nonemployees . Assign holds to one, several, or all Legal Hold Managers in your organization, depending on your individual legal, HR, or business needs.
Compliance is the primary goal of a business’s records and information management program, which is there to help ensure compliance with all regulatory requirements and obligations. The best practices and processes should be for providing accurate and timely information, which a legal hold application such as Legal Hold Pro enables. Ensure the defensible nature of your organization’s approach to its litigation hold obligations is documented and followed by all participants. By following the proven and demonstrable business processes that are provided, Legal Hold Pro helps to ensure compliance with the law.
Automate your legal hold notifications, responses, suspension and reminders through the flexibility of the Legal Hold Manager. Track the compliance and accountability of all custodians and managers involved in a legal hold. Automated e-mail notifications make it easy for communication to flow through any number of custodian interfaces.
Legal Hold Pro Features
One of the standout features of Legal Hold Pro is its ability to automate notifications to relevant parties. This means that those involved in a legal hold process no longer need to chase down parties or remind them of their obligations. The system does it for them. This boost in efficiency is a hallmark of the program. Audit trails are another feature that help ensure legal holds are as comprehensive as possible. An audit trail keeps track of all actions taken in the system, including emails sent, confirmations received, and more. This is a critical component for any electronically stored information (ESI) collection process, so it’s imperative that firms find software that can handle these functions. Compliance tracking is another standout element. A legal hold cannot, by itself, enforce compliance. But Legal Hold Pro can. It will send out reminders to custodians about the need to preserve information. It will also allow users to see who has confirmed their understanding of the legal hold and who has not. The ability to integrate with other software is often overlooked when looking at a software program like this. But there is a wide range of law firm software packages on the market designed to manage numerous elements of the business. When it comes to the legal hold process, Legal Hold Pro dovetails nicely with these programs. This means that everyone in the firm uses the same platform to handle the same processes. This makes sense, as even though the actual process regarding legal holds remains distinct and separate, it’s still an important function that most firms handle in the same way. Legal Hold Pro is one of the strongest products on the market for automating an important component of the litigation process. It is also very responsive to the needs of its clients. Through its various tools, attorneys and law firm staff can stay on top of legal holds.
Deploying Legal Hold Pro Across Your Organization
The deployment of Legal Hold Pro is a straight forward process. With the help of the system administrator, the set up time is usually minimal and outlining a plan for optimal deployment and maximization of effectiveness can be done in a matter of weeks. The implementation of the software into the day-to-day operations of a company, however, takes more careful planning, communication and understanding about the best way to integrate it into an organization. This section will focus on specific areas of focus for the successful implementation of Legal Hold Pro into the business processes of corporate America and/or law firms. (Insert chart) The maintenance of the system does require an annual audit session where a comparability test is performed to demonstrate the integrity of the program. The administration of the program through a dedicated system administrator is the best way to assure people are using the mechanism in accordance with the plan and that the handling of legal holds is supported with high levels of oversight, as opposed to management by committee.
Advantages of Legal Hold Pro
One of the most significant advantages of Legal Hold Pro is its potential to substantially improve legal compliance. With automated notifications and reminders for individuals involved in drafting or distributing legal holds, the risk of a legal hold "slipping through the cracks" is greatly reduced. For instance, the use of Legal Hold Pro can provide attorneys a high degree of confidence their notice to third parties has been received by the intended recipient, if those notices are sent using a program such as Gmail or Outlook. In circumstances when compliance requires retention of phone records, the mere fact that phone records are being retained can become an issue if any of the relevant carriers have a policy that would allow the customer to refuse to comply with a legal hold notice. In this scenario, Legal Hold Pro tracks compliance with automatic communications to third parties involved in the legal hold. With Legal Hold Pro the client need not worry that additional time was not spent by the custodian to confirm phone records will be retained or that some other party forgot to remind the client the records must be retained.
Another significant benefit of Legal Hold Pro is its ability to manage multiple legal holds simultaneously. Without Legal Hold Pro, most firms will have one (and only one) system for maintaining sensitive and confidential information implicated in more than one litigation. For example, it’s not uncommon for a law firm to use one software program to sends notices to human resources employees and another software program to send notices to an IT department when the same custodian/employee is subject to separate litigation. It’s also common for some custodians/Employees to be subject to multiple Annual Employee Benefit Plan audits. While each of these HR employees will get notices from both departments, they will likely get the approaches and therefore the notices will be different. Legal Hold Pro manages multiple notices and updates so that the same employee is receiving notices that look and feel the same for each different litigation. Lastly, if the Firm needs to change the process of creating, distributing and monitoring a legal hold, Legal Hold Pro allows the Firm to upload any document in the system and convert it into a notice. The Firm should periodically review how notices are being sent to employees and whether the Firm can improve its process with a new format or a new type of notice.
Common Issues and Resolutions with Legal Hold Pro
Dealing with issues related to Legal Hold Pro is an unfortunate but possible situation when using this software. What follows are some of the most common problems that you may have to deal with during your time using the program.
User training
The most common issue with new software is user training. Even with a superior product such as InTouch’s Legal Hold Pro, there are always updates, changes or new features. You need to find a way to train users in these changes. The solution here is simple: contact InTouch. If you are not spending a lot of time training users, InTouch recommends a simple e-mail notification about the new feature. You could also send out an e-mail with three pictures and instructions. InTouch has a consultant staff available, although there are costs associated. InTouch is well aware of the issues associated with transitioning to new software and they have staff assigned to help facilitate such projects.
Technical support
Again, like user training, this is a pretty basic solution. For most issues, calling or e-mailing in to InTouch’s support will get results. Their approach is not to help you address these issues with your client , but to fix the source of the problem instead. That’s pretty much the focus of InTouch. This approach makes a lot of sense — if you have to spend valuable time working out a solution to a problem, you want a permanent solution so that you do not have to encounter the same problem in the future, right?
What about Legacy Matters?
With some legacy matters, there can be some issues. It’s important to understand that old data can be troublesome. For example, some old data that is pulled from a shared directory by Legal Hold Pro may be different from the original copy. Since this is legacy data too, it can be very troubling. The solution is to get the legacy information into the same format that Legal Hold Pro uses now. This is fairly easy to do. Additionally, as you move forward on new matters and break old matters down, there are some issues with how to handle these. Commonly there will be issues concerning how documents are situated. In essence, some documents can be on multiple holds, on different sides of the matter. There are ways to flip the information at InTouch to deal with this. Five key things happen As you go through this process, there will be an e-mail that will explain everything in more detail, and with pictures. InTouch has a great team of people who can help with this process.
Legal Hold Pro and the Competition
Legal Hold Pro comes with its own advantages and disadvantages in comparison with similar legal hold software that are available in the market. In this section, we will be analyzing Legal Hold Pro’s features, pricing, ease of use, and customer service against some of its competitors to help you determine if it is the right legal hold software for you and your organization.
With its price starting from $5/user/month, Legal Hold Pro is one of the more affordable legal hold software available in the market. Active Engagement (formerly OnCorps) starts from $49/concurrent holders/month, Zapproved from $42/user/month, Zactive from $99/user/month, Exterro from $20/user/month, and Guidance Software from $25/user/month. Depending on the number of users that you require and how many active holders you need to send your legal hold notices to, Legal Hold Pro comes at a much lower price than most of its competitors.
All of the legal hold software mentioned above provide an infinite number of free holds, self-service notice disclosures, automated email reminders for users to re-confirm their preservation obligations, holders from other departments, reminders for holders with prior discovery involved in past holds but have not yet responded to the new hold notice, automatic tracking of recipients, user-friendly interface, and self-service notice releases. Guidance Software also helps you save your notices in PDF format. Active Engagement allows for concurrent hold management. OnCorps allows users to assign notifications and communicate directly with the plaintiff. Unlike Legal Hold Pro, Zactive allows companies to send holds in other languages, such as French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. Both Legal Hold Pro and Zactive offers the ability to resend the invites to those have failed to confirm their preservation obligations. Exterro allows recipients to update their personal information as well as to pick their preferred language. They also allow managers to give consent on the release or destruction of data.
Some of the advanced features of Legal Hold Pro that aren’t available in Active Engagement, Zapproved, Zactive, Exterro and Guidance Software are several customizable templates (that are great if your organization deals with multiple jurisdictions), automatic lifecycle tracking of custodians’ hold status, integration with corporate software systems, historical data tracking, Granular Permission Controls, Roles Management, Rights Management, Library for Pre-Saved Templates, In-House Processing Management, Reports on Data, Hold Lifecycle, Cost Management, and Collection/Preservation Management.
The competition focuses on supporting the corporate lawyers and legal departments, our features are more geared towards the corporate IT departments and IT experts in general. The ability to track the holders’ response to the notices, manage the retention policy on the holders’ selected data, and to outsource the processing of that data to us are some of the features that set us apart from our competitors. The benefit here is that now corporate lawyers and legal departments can focus on preparing their cases while we take care of the technical IT work that normally gets in the way of their tasks.
The only feature that Legal Hold Pro lacks that some of its competitors provide is a collection management system. Legal Hold Pro does not regret the lack of this feature since it believes that this task is more of a technical duty so to speak and it is more suited for IT experts than lawyers. Legal Hold Pro allows you to export your data to any collection management system in the market and specifically to Logikcull, Everlaw, Logikull, iprofessionals, and Opus2.
We are always available via chat or phone and we respond to both on average within two hours. Legal Hold Pro offers free live demos and we also provide dedicated online training programs for each of our clients. Legal Hold Pro prices itself to make sure that the clients are happy with the software and the support they receive.
Legal Hold Pro supports Croatian, Chinese (simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. The only software offering legal hold notices in more than one language is Zactive, which provides support for French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.
The Future of Legal Hold Software
Legal hold technology continues to be one of the fastest-evolving areas of the e-discovery market, and this is no less true with Legal Hold Pro. Some of the most significant trends include increased emphasis on compliance, more robust integrations and a focus on automating processes. Legal Hold Pro not only shows its commitment to staying ahead of these trends but also actively drives its development road-map according to the anticipated future needs of its customers.
Automation, for example, is an area where Legal Hold Pro excels. While some vendors bury automation in a bloated package at an additional cost, Legal Hold Pro was developed from the ground up to: (1) be powered by a robust application programming interface (API) that lets it seamlessly integrate with case management systems or custom applications (no extra charge) , and (2) offer robust, custom workflows that can help users gain efficiencies at every stage of the legal hold process (this is an add-on feature).
As a cloud-based solution, Legal Hold Pro is future-proof, already optimized for the new cloud-first focus of Microsoft Office 365. The software has been fully integrated with Sharepoint, letting users take advantage of O365’s most powerful collaboration tools without a separate interface or workflow. Legal Hold Pro has also been able to fully leverage Microsoft Graph in its API, creating a truly disruptive application to let organizations instantaneously garner insight into the entirety of its Office 365 environment (e.g., Exchange, One Drive, Sharepoint, Skype, etc.).
With Legal Hold Pro, the future is now.