Published on Aug 11, 2014 Do you need to issue and track the status of litigation holds, without specialized software to help with the task? Don’t fret! Legal holds can be done with email, hyperlinks and a spreadsheet. While the details may vary according to the litigation and organization, there are key elements of a legal hold that are universal.
Step 1: Identify your legal hold notice recipients, and distinguish between types of recipients. Different notices should be sent to the employees who are custodians of relevant documents versus IT administrators. An IT administrator needs to know which systems and custodians are involved in the hold. A custodian needs to know more about the facts of the matter and what may be considered a relevant document.
Step 2: Draft and send the legal hold notice. You should require the custodian to respond and acknowledge the legal hold. It should provide several options for responses (e.g. I understand, don’t have documents; I understand, have documents; I have questions, etc.). The easier you make acknowledgement for the custodians, the more likely they are to respond. If distributing via an HTML based email, you can hyperlink the acknowledgement response options with prepopulated email addresses and subject lines that indicate the answer. For example, each response option can include an instruction to “click here.” Also, you may consider including a copy of the litigation hold in the body of the email as well as an attachment (e.g., PDF). This makes it easy for users to read, regardless of the type of device they are using when viewing the hold.
Step 3: Track and maintain a record of the responses, reminders, etc. This can easily be done in spreadsheets such as Excel, Access or SharePoint lists. A few key things to track include:
Step 4: Follow up with reminders on a periodic basis — commonly at least every six months. Calendar entries help with reminders and follow-ups. Using distribution groups can be extremely helpful to sort and filter incoming responses. Distribution groups also ensure no one will be accidentally left out.
