Legal Hold for Early Case Assessment and Evidence Preservation

Evidence Preservation of Electronic Information

Today, the average Global 2000 Company has an average of one hundred and forty-three concurrent lawsuits and the average mid to large company has over twenty ongoing suits at any given point in time. Lawsuit frequency, litigation threats, and damage reward requests continue to increase daily. With the average litigation expense exceeding two million dollars, creating a strong offensive litigation capability to defend corporate interest is critical to maintain competitiveness and defend corporate interests. To be successful in instituting a sound offensive capability, corporations must have a sound methodology and robust eDiscovery technology to prevent spoliation and preserve relevant materials, as well as the chain of evidence. If not, corporations may incur harsh penalties and extended litigation periods and expenses. With information distributed across laptops, desktops, servers, storage systems, email and content repositories, the need for a robust and automated discovery and preservation capability has never been more important to meet ever shrinking discovery timelines, early assessment reviews, and litigation hold procedures.

Kazeon’s KazHold Legal Hold Capability

Broadening Kazeon's award winning IS200-ECS Information Server capabilities, KazHold TM delivers powerful and dynamic legal hold functionality to the eDiscovery suite. KazHold TM adds “in-place legal hold” and “legal hold to secure repositories” capabilities.

The first feature, “in-place legal hold”, places a lock on any potential material information where it resides on the network and modifies file permissions, so only the Legal Hold Owner has access. Potential relevant information on a laptop in Asia, desktop in Europe, or server at corporate headquarters can be frozen on the device on which it is found with all metadata and content preserved intact. “In-place legal hold” provides an immediate lockdown of potentially relevant ESI with a click of a button. KazHold TM 's in-place legal hold is released just as easily as it was set. This feature delivers a powerful early assessment capability without the collection challenges.

The second feature, “legal hold to secure repositories”, executes a “copy and move” to a secure storage system, then performs a data integrity and verification test to ensure chain of evidence preservation. With Kazeon's EDRM compliance, the “copy and move” capability is seamlessly integrated with industry leading retention providers, ie. NetApp's SnapLock, Data Domain's Retention Lock and Symantec's Enterprise Vault. This features provides extensive defensibility and auditability for eDiscovery by ensuring no spoliation of data and no modifications to metadata attributes of files and emails.

The “in-place legal hold” and “legal hold to secure repositories” are features which can be used separately or together. Used together, Kazeon's KazHold allows corporations to quickly freeze information “in-place” for initial assessment then to “move and copy” only relevant case information, which saves network bandwidth, processing time, and storage expense.

KazHold - Legal Hold Features

• In-Place Hold for immediate lockdown during early assessments
• In-place analysis before deciding to collect information
• Prevents owner/user from reading or modifying file once it is tagged for legal hold
• “Copy and move” for evidence and relevant material preservation
• Data Verification – ensures forensic soundness of copied ESI
• Original permissions maintained separately for easy reversion once hold is removed
• Integration with industry leading storage providers

KazHold - Legal Hold Benefits

• Accelerates early case assessments
• Reduces exposure to risk
• Saves time
• Reduce network bandwidth and load
• Reduces processing time
• Reduces storage expense
• Ensure complete authenticity of analyzed/collected files
• Data Verification and Logging delivers provable and repeatable forensic soundness