Despite organizations seeing an overall reduction in resources and budgets, their spending on legal department technology is on the rise. According to Thomson Reuters, law department leaders are increasing their investments by 30 percent. And 44 percent are expanding their technology tools.
It’s no surprise that legal hold is one of their top three tech priorities.
Organizations deal with lawsuits all the time. Conflicts arise over workplace discrimination, overtime pay, customer injuries sustained on-premises, intellectual property, contracts and more. You name it, someone has filed a lawsuit over it.
To resolve claims, organizations need proof of who said or did what. Many organizations continue to manage litigation holds with manual processes—sending emails to custodians and tracking information in a spreadsheet. This is not only time-consuming, but also risk-prone and can lead to unanticipated costs through user errors and sanctions.
Legal hold technology—especially when it uses automation and the cloud—delivers a fast, high-ROI way to improve the efficiency of managing legal holds. Legal hold technology delivered via the cloud standardizes traditional legal hold tasks for creation, distribution, tracking, reporting and more.
Here’s how legal hold technology offered in the cloud can automate hold activities to eliminate manually intensive processes and enhance inter-departmental collaboration by integrating with HR and IT systems—all while lowering costs.
Increase efficiency and minimize risk
Automating legal hold processes helps legal departments gain control over data, establishes defensible processes and eliminates risky manual tasks and the painful-to-manage spreadsheets associated with them. Legal teams can reduce effort by automating notifications, interviews, reminders and reports. Centralizing and standardizing the legal hold workflow through an easy-to-use solution also helps achieve compliance across legal hold requirements.
Reduce costs
By using a cloud-based legal hold solution, organizations can trade CapEx for OpEx and reduce the time and costs involved with managing legal holds. With no hardware or software to purchase, manage and maintain, legal departments are able to direct those budgets elsewhere. Managing the legal hold process in the cloud allows legal teams to use the technology immediately, with 24/7 availability, for all legal hold activities, whether they are working from the office or remotely.
Improve inter-departmental collaboration
Legal departments cannot manage data preservation or legal holds in isolation. HR is an integral partner because it has the information on arriving and departing custodians. IT is also a key partner because it manages the devices and systems that house data subject to legal hold. Legal hold software integrates with IT and HR systems to instill effective employee change management. New employees who will be working with data that is subject to legal hold can be easily added as custodians. And safeguards can be put in place to make sure that IT does not wipe legal hold data from the machines of departing employees.
Trade spreadsheets for automation in the cloud
With the rise in demand for cost-effective and efficient processes, legal hold tools are a great example of technology that can have fast ROI.
OpenText™ Legal Hold is quickly set up through a secure cloud environment. A fixed-fee subscription model means that legal teams don’t have to worry about escalating costs if the number of legal holds or custodians increases. By automating the legal hold process and integrating with Microsoft® O365® and HR systems, OpenText Legal Hold can reduce the risk of sanctions for lost evidence (spoliation) through effective in-place preservation of data subject to legal holds.
Learn more about how OpenText Legal Hold automates interrelated litigation hold activities for civil actions, regulatory requests, internal investigations and employment matters. This drives greater efficiency by helping teams to move away from spreadsheets and manual processes.
To understand more about how to improve the legal hold process and reduce risk, read OpenText’s white paper on Practical guidance on managing legal holds.
