Legal Hold Software

Choosing the Right Legal Hold Software

Buying new ediscovery software for your organization can be a tricky process to navigate, particularly if you’re not sure what you’re looking for. There are so many considerations to keep in mind, including functionality, ediscovery price, data security, and deployment.

Legal holds are a cornerstone of any corporate legal department and are the foundation from which all the following ediscovery work is based. It’s critical to identify which solution is the best fit for your organization.

First and most importantly, look for solutions that are specifically designed for the unique ediscovery needs of corporate legal teams. Here are a few other tips to help you get started.

Corporate legal departments need enterprise-level, scalable, defensible litigation hold solutions to be able to automate notifications, track responses, and report out across multiple custodians, matters, and stakeholders. And because legal holds should never exist on an island, any legal software better be able to integrate into all the other enterprise systems a company has already invested in.

Look for cloud-based legal hold software that offers:

• Integration with other enterprise systems like Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS), asset tracking, Matter Management Systems (MMS), and data collection systems.
• Enterprise-level scalability and flexibility as your company grows.
• Automation to reduce time spent managing manual tasks and tracking.
• Intuitive UI that is easy to navigate without requiring extensive training.
• Built-in reporting for quick and clear visibility.
• Robust audit trail for holds and data preservations.
• Escalations and reminders to help drive custodian compliance.
• Future-proof technology that meets your needs today and 5 years from now.
• Customer support from implementation through advanced workflow development and beyond.
• Deep expertise migrating legal hold data out of old or existing systems.

Legal hold software should be simple enough for anyone to use with minimal training, so that you can equip your whole team rather than rely on a few experts. A key question to ask when purchasing any legal software is, “Can my team actually use this?” For your new solution to become fully integrated into your ediscovery flow and provide a return on investment for your organization, it needs to be intuitive. 

There’s one more reason to prioritize ease of use, and it’s an important one: your people. Your people are your biggest investment. By giving them tools that are intuitive and simple to use, you make their jobs and lives easier.

It’s tough to ask for more budget even in the best of times, and it’s only gotten more challenging amid today’s uncertainty. Whether you want to replace an outdated legacy system or a manual process, understand how prospective legal hold software will drive efficiency and streamline the legal department’s work.

The ROI of ZDiscovery Hold

• 70% less time spent issuing legal holds
• 80% less time on tracking and managing legal holds
• 95% reduction in custodian time to review and acknowledge holds
• 80% less time to preserve data
• 75% reduction in time to defend preservation practices

We went from 5-6 hours a week to just minutes to track holds, a 95%+ improvement, and from 2-3 hours a week to 30 minutes or less to make changes to holds, a 75-85% decrease in time.

— Legal Administrative Assistant using ZDiscovery Hold

Cloud-based software is more and more common as businesses are increasingly turning to the cloud to power sales, finance, and other routine-but-critical processes. ZDiscovery’s cloud architecture reduces costs, risks, and the burden on IT that come with on-premise installed legal software.

Here are some of the benefits of ZDiscovery Hold’s cloud-based legal holds:  

• Take the load off IT: No more time-consuming servers to configure, maintain, troubleshoot, and monitor. 
• Lower costs with more flexibility: Eliminate the big upfront investment in equipment and expensive maintenance contracts. Software updates are automatically delivered so the ZDiscovery Hold is always up to date. 
• Enterprise-level security: ZDiscovery Hold is backed by world-class standards of privacy and data security. 
• Software that works wherever you are: As long as you can access a browser, work from anywhere with security and collaboration tools built in.