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Start Strong: 3 Ways You Can Use Legal Hold & Collect Together

Dylan Salisbury

As the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It seems that carries through to matters of regulatory compliance and litigation as well. Often a small amount of attention to how you start out a matter can have big implications for the degree of options you have later. That’s why performing accurate and defensible legal holds and collections is so paramount to a strong e-discovery strategy.

And it’s why we at Relativity are constantly innovating on Relativity Legal Hold and Collect—we want to bring you versatility, efficiency, and defensibility to all your projects from the very start.

There are so many ways Relativity customers use Legal Hold and Collect to streamline and bulletproof their projects early on. Here are our top three.

#1: Secure Integration with Office 365

Legal Hold allows you to integrate seamlessly with enterprise systems such as Microsoft Office 365, where most enterprise data is stored, easily ensuring all the necessary custodians and data are identified and preserved.

But after you have preserved that data, you are still left with the challenge of collecting and bringing it into your discovery process—which can invite risky data transfers (not to mention time-consuming and laborious processes). With Collect and Legal Hold together, you can sidestep that problem entirely. Simply connect and go.

Collect easily and securely connects with Office 365 data—including Exchange mailboxes and OneDrive files—allowing you to safely collect that data without ever having to leave the cloud.

You can use one platform to easily move from Legal Hold on through the litigation lifecycle, mitigating risk and additional time spent moving data and working with separate tools. It’s a true end-to-end solution.

Best of all: Microsoft Office 365 is just the beginning. We’ll debut more data sources over the next few releases including Slack, G Suite, and X1 endpoint collections.

#2: Preservation in Place

When you are in the midst of a sensitive, risky, and potentially costly matter, such as an internal investigation or subpoena request, the last thing you want is a custodian deleting data.

By using Legal Hold together with Collect, you can preserve and collect large amounts of targeted data from custodians without their knowledge or assistance, mitigating the risk of data loss or the need to over-collect.

Even if a custodian does try to delete data in Office 365, Legal Hold will continue to preserve the data until the hold is released, preventing data from being destroyed or lost during the hold.

Even better: Built-in reports provide an at-a-glance look at how many active preservation holds you have, as well as an audit trail so you can monitor preservations and collections in real time and get instant insight into project status.

#3: Complying with GDPR and CCPA

Personal privacy regulations like the GDPR and CCPA have broad and potentially costly implications for legal teams—among them are the right for individuals to have personally identifiable information (PII) that is held by your company deleted.

Unfortunately, this can stand at odds with an organization’s obligation to retain evidence that is relevant to current litigation or future litigation. While there are serious consequences to violating CCPA or GDPR guidelines, personal information is often exempt from deletion if needed in complying with legal obligations. In these instances, you can use Legal Hold to place the disputed PII in a hold until the matter can be resolved.

Furthermore, Legal Hold can help you address this shifting landscape by identifying in which jurisdiction data is stored, whether there is duplicated data, what is subject to CCPA or GDPR, and what is relevant and needs to be placed into hold. You can also use Legal Hold to obtain the required consent from your users for managing their data. As covered in our recent blog post, using Legal Hold to automate practices by jurisdiction allows teams to save time and avoid costly mistakes.

That’s Not All: Meet Aero UI

There has been a lot of excitement around the release of our new RelativityOne user interface, Aero UI. Design is embedded in everything we do and that certainly runs through Legal Hold and Collect as well.

We are enthusiastic about the updates that the new user interface will bring to your experience, and we know you will be too. At a high level, we see it delivering value to users in a number of ways, specifically:

  • Increased efficiency with more intuitive and automated workflows
  • Reducing instances of work slowdowns or stoppages
  • Giving you time back to focus on the strategic work that will drive your team forward

Watch this video learn more about the changes that Aero will deliver to the RelativityOne platform at large and what you can expect.

Interested in trying out Legal Hold or RelativityOne? Both are available with pay-as-you-go pricing, so you’ll only pay for what you use month to month. Learn how to get started.

See How Relativity Collect Works


Dylan Salisbury is a product marketing manager at Relativity, where he specializes in understanding and serving the corporate community.

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