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Legal Hold Software: Features and Evalution Criteria

Legal hold software helps preserve data and reduce legal hassles. Here's what to look for in a system.

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April 05, 2010 — CSO —

Legal hold software is intended to help companies comply with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), which require them to preserve potentially relevant information when litigation can reasonably be anticipated. Specifically, it helps businesses satisfy the requirement to send written legal holds to identified individuals and take ongoing and proactive steps to ensure their compliance.

The importance of doing legal hold correctly was driven home by a February 2010 opinion by Judge Shira Scheindlin, a thought leader in e-discovery, who said that a finding of gross negligence could be supported if companies failed to:

  • Issue a written litigation hold.
  • Identify key players and ensure their electronic and paper records are preserved.
  • Cease deleting e-mail or records of former employees that are in a company's possession, custody or control.
  • Preserve backup tapes when they are the sole source of relevant information or when they relate to key players, if the relevant information maintained by those players is not obtainable from readily accessible sources.

As the law becomes more defined, companies are turning to automated methods of preserving relevant data in a systemized, repeatable and defensible manner that eliminates human error, allows faster response times to requests and decreases exposure to potential sanctions. "The time-honored approach is to manually issue written notices to all relevant custodians, but with the massive data explosion, that's a very difficult thing to track," says Deb Logan, an analyst at Gartner.

Also see the companion article How to Compare and Use Legal Hold Software


Legal hold software also helps bridge the gap between IT and legal. "IT are the ones who are going to have to produce the backup tapes or e-mail files," says Christine Taylor, an analyst at Taneja Group. "But IT is rarely told or consulted or given a hint that there might be a legal case."

Legal Hold Market Drivers

While many companies do not use automated legal hold software today, the number that does use it is expected to rise as litigation frequency and data volumes increase. For instance, in a recent survey by Forrester and ARMA International, less than half (48%) of the 400 records-management decision makers surveyed said their records-management solution supports legal hold natively or through a third-party integration. More than half said their application doesn't support legal hold, that they don't know if it does, or that it does, but those capabilities aren't currently being used.

This represents considerable legal exposure, according to the report. "In conjunction with legal, IT and other stakeholders, it's essential to implement and improve legal hold procedures," the report said.

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