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Many of today's midsize and large corporations find themselves embroiled in dozens, if not hundreds, of lawsuits and government investigations, each with implications for electronically stored information (ESI). Because courts and governmental agencies are regularly sanctioning and fining corporations for failing to implement and properly maintain legal holds, the ability to defensibly preserve relevant ESI in a timely manner is critical.
Fios' Legal Hold Management Service helps clients rapidly assess current practices, identify critical gaps, determine needs and requirements, and implement effective solutions for ensuring defensible preservation of ESI, including effective management of legal holds when required. Fios' consultants develop detailed implementation plans that incorporate people, process and technology to ensure preservation requirements are being met for electronic discovery. This includes the evaluation and implementation of legal hold management technology to ensure effective system configuration, provisioning, rollout and training.
Executing legal holds on the right evidence
Understanding where ESI lives throughout the organization when executing legal holds is critical. Fios has extensive experience in the identification phase of e-discovery, guiding clients in making the right decisions when a preservation action is triggered, and in identifying which custodians and data repositories are subject to the hold. A core component of this phase is data or content mapping. Fios has a well-honed methodology for identifying relevant data repositories, capturing and documenting the right information, and presenting it in ways useful to both legal and IT when issuing and fulfilling preservation requests. Fios' consultants bring to the process a thorough understanding of preservation protocols, which range from "preserve-in-place" technologies capable of suspending routine data destruction to "collect-to-preserve" tactics necessary to quarantine and secure ESI.
Fios also has years of expertise working with the technologies available during the identification and preservation phases of e-discovery. This practical experience enables our consultants to tailor solutions, whether home-grown or commercial applications, to meet the preservation needs of the organization and the legal matter.
Service delivery components
- Legal holds needs assessment—Research and document current capabilities for identifying and preserving ESI in response to a preservation obligation, including how legal hold notices are issued, managed and released
- Analysis of current practices—Review existing or planned people, processes and technologies currently in place to address and manage legal hold requirements
- Preservation gap analysis—Analyze gaps between existing and optimum legal hold preservation practices and the impact of such gaps on e-discovery costs, burden and risk, based on the organization's litigation risk and regulatory compliance profile
- Legal hold solution recommendations—Recommend next steps for improving utilization of existing or acquiring new technologies
- Legal hold implementation—Implement detailed project plan, including support for provisioning, deploying, customizing and training of legal hold management solutions
Sample deliverables
- Documented needs assessment and requirements framework of the legal hold process
- Solution recommendations that address specific needs of the organization and its legal portfolio
- Detailed implementation project plan, to include training strategy for all affected employees and tracking of progress to ensure timely execution
- Discovery response planning services, including ESI Content Mapping and documentation of consistent and repeatable business processes when responding to preservation obligations
Key benefits
- Enables the organization to invest in the right people, process and technologies to defensibly meet its preservation obligations in a repeatable manner
- Maximizes the return on investments in technology for legal hold management
- Ensures legal hold management technologies are tailored and configured to address the specific needs of the organization
- Delivers comprehensive planning that reflects organizational maturity, current or expected litigation portfolio, capacity for change and future e-discovery response needs
About Fios, Inc.
For over a decade, Fios has helped corporations and their outside counsel reduce risk, control costs and gain management control over the entire spectrum of e-discovery. We are dedicated exclusively to delivering comprehensive services and expert guidance that transform the burdensome nature of electronic discovery into a streamlined, legally defensible business process.