Relativity Legal Hold

Relativity has a checklist to follow when implementing a legal hold. Relativity Legal Hold is an application that helps an analyst send out hold notifications, and track the responses to those notifications. Using Legal Hold will leave behind an audit trail to confirm that relevant custodians have been contacted. It's important to identify who is performing the following roles when preparing a hold for a client:

1. The project stakeholders - client employees responsible for determining who the relevant custodians are, and sending out the hold notices.

2. The Legal Hold admins - who will actually be using the Relativity application.

3. The data stewards - which client employees manage its information systems.

4. The alert groups - who receives the responses from custodians.

Relativity uses an interesting term, "escalation cadence", to refer to how unresponsive custodians are to be reminded of their obligation to comply with a hold. I hadn't heard this term before, but its obvious how it is important to get this right. These should be tailored for individual custodians, and individual projects.

The application includes templates for a general hold notice; a release notice, and an email acknowledgment.

Note that the new Osier release of Relativity lets an admin assign custodians to a project automatically using a list of employee numbers.