Large organizations often use legal retention software to automate many of these steps, making it easier to notify recipients and track everyone`s activity. In addition, some storage systems and data-driven platforms include litigation retention features that can override existing retention and deletion policies, preventing data from being modified or destroyed until a legal action is resolved. Not everyone who reads your embargo period is a lawyer. The purpose of a statutory retention obligation is to ensure that custodians comply with their obligation to retain relevant data. Make sure your communication is not full of legal language, the specific information that needs to be kept, including details of the names and dates of the documents, and provides relevant examples of custodian banks. The conclusion is the judicial decision on a point of law on the basis of the question presented in the present case. In other words, according to this law, with these facts, this result results. It is the same as a “decision” of the judge; However, the term “decision” may also refer to the judge`s overall opinion, which includes, for example, a discussion of the facts, issues and law, as well as the conclusion. The conclusion is the “principle of law that must flow from the opinion (decision) of the Tribunal”. [1] Your legal detention procedure is not completed if it does not contain provisions on the release of the right to block when the retention obligation has expired. A legal hold notice allows your organization to resume its normal retention policies and schedules, and allows administrators (internal and external vendors) to resume their usual workflows without fear of looting.
While it is good practice to have email templates and a streamlined process for issuing a legal hold as efficiently as possible, a notice of legal hold should be a thoughtful document tailored to the needs of each case. This is usually the first step in creating a legal retention period. The legal team must determine what information may be relevant to a case. Today, it is common for this data to be stored electronically (or “ESI”), but it can also include physical documents such as logbooks and paper files. Once you have identified an event that triggers an obligation to retain potentially relevant ISIs, you should ensure that you issue a legal retention period as soon as possible. However, before you can create and distribute a legal retention notice, you must specify a few things: A legal suspension applies to both paper copies of documents and electronically stored information (ESI). Hard copies may include minutes, notes, forms, newsletters, photos, appointment books, printed emails and any other type of physical document. ESI may contain all relevant electronic data, regardless of its format or storage. If ESI is involved (i.e. 99% of the time today), your IT or legal departments are great allies when it comes to finding information sources and custodians. A robust information governance program is also essential to easily identify where potentially relevant ISIs are located and who is responsible for maintaining them.
No matter how clear, specific, and easy your legal retention notice may be, you will certainly have to deal with custodians who ignore you or even do not comply with their retention obligations, even after acknowledging receipt of the legal retention notice. And while this can be one of the most frustrating parts of the legal blocking process, there are steps you can take without manually sending dozens of reminders per week. Solution: Before escalating a situation with an unresponsive administrator, you should try to exhaust all methods of direct communication with him. To make your life easier, you can maintain a consistent follow-up schedule and make sure to notify caregivers who do not respond a certain number of times before taking any further action. There are legal retention tools that allow you to automate follow-up emails, making this process much easier. However, if you are still ignored after multiple follow-up investigations, an escalation notification may be required. The aim is to inform the head of the custodian bank of his inaction, to make him aware of the risks to which the company may be exposed and to ask him to intervene. Download a printable version of the Legal Best Practices Checklist here. In Zubulake, Justice Scheindlin clarified that parties are required to legally obtain relevant information as soon as litigation is imminent.
However, the process of arriving at this decision – estimating when litigation is “imminent” or “reasonably expected” and deciding what counts as “potentially relevant information” – can be more complex than it seems. Once the legal case is over, you must inform the custodians that their retention obligation has ended. A rigorous release process is important to ensure that no guard is released from their obligations when they should not, and that no guard is left waiting forever. In addition to ongoing litigation, a judicial stay may be introduced following an audit and/or investigation. This will have many implications for company policy. For example, legal retention often changes the rules for securing data in a system, managing tape vaults, or other archives for storing and recycling physical storage media. Changes to the federal rules of civil procedure in the United States affect eDiscovery or digital information discovery to bring local processes into the 21st century. The main objective of the legal retention policy is to ensure a consistent and defensible approach to the retention obligation. And while this obligation may be known to legal departments and senior management, most employees, including potential custodians of relevant ISTs, are generally unaware of it. Therefore, another purpose of a litigation retention policy is to help employees understand the obligation to retain information and the potential consequences for the organization as a whole if this obligation is not met.