Intelligent Legal Hold simplifies and expedites a forensically-sound legal hold process

The StoredIQ Intelligent Information Management Platform includes sophisticated technology to place and enforce legal holds for eDiscovery, records management, or information governance.  StoredIQ Intelligent Legal Hold works with Analyze Anywhere™ technology to enable a user to quickly perform analysis on live data sources prior to preservation, then select a subset to collect for legal hold.  With a few simple clicks, data is copied from the data source to a secure repository.  To ensure that the copy is forensically sound, a hash is performed on the source file and is compared to a hash of the copy on the repository.   In addition, the entire set of metadata associated with the file is retained, including the full file path of the original object.  This original location data is invaluable since source location provides significant insight for the legal analyst or counsel during downstream formal review, enabling a faster, qualitatively enriched review process.

One of the most unique and critical features of StoredIQ Intelligent Legal Hold is ‘single-instance’ preservation.  Often, the same files are relevant for multiple cases, and in these cases, StoredIQ will copy and place on legal hold a single instance of that file on the repository.  If that file is required for multiple matters, each matter will utilize that single copy, saving cost, storage space, and as importantly, the time and bandwidth required to access the data.  And, since StoredIQ can perform incremental collections, only files that have been modified since they were last collected will be recollected for preservation, further reducing the time for collection.  When all matters are concluded and the obligation for legal hold is removed, the file will then be available for disposition from the repository. 

However, since StoredIQ Intelligent Legal Hold is synchronized across all applications, including eDiscovery, Records Management, Governance and Compliance, a file that is no longer relevant for a legal matter, may still in fact be obligated to legal hold for other use cases, and will therefore continue to be held.  

The entire legal hold process is documented with comprehensive audit trails, preserving the authenticity and chain of custody, and is integrated with all
market-leading immutable storage platforms for retention.

StoredIQ also supports the ability to hold data ‘in-place’ by changing the permissions on the data to prevent the custodian from opening or editing the contents.  While generally not recommended, there are specific instances where legal hold-in-place is appropriate.  For example, with Microsoft Exchange 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010, a hold-in-place feature is supported intelligently.  On these platforms, users are not locked out of their data that is on hold, but a secure copy is made on the system instead.  Consequently, StoredIQ supports this intrinsic legal hold in-place capability on these types of advanced data sources.

Key Highlights:

• StoredIQ Intelligent Legal Hold makes forensically-sound copies of relevant data on immutable retention platforms; alternatively, StoredIQ supports ‘in-place’ preservation
• Digital signature hashes ensures data is unchanged, preserving all metadata
• Audit trails of every action are automatically kept and chains of custody remain intact
• Legal holds are synchronized across all use cases and applications