How does email archiving simplify the legal hold process?

Emails are an inevitable part of modern business communication. Business-critical information—such as financial data, contracts, transactions, and patents—is stored in emails. With emails holding such important information, it's crucial that they're preserved with utmost caution. The importance of preserving such data is further reinforced when the organization faces a legal proceeding and they're mandated to provide email evidence as part of the case. 

It's common for organizations to come in face with legal proceedings from their customers, partners, or even competitors. In such cases, the company needs to be prepared to produce relevant evidence if required. The best way to do this is by preserving important email data for a certain period. An email archiving solution creates a repository of all the important data, making it easier for admins to manage their company's emails without any chance of alteration or deletion. 

Placing a legal hold on emails through an archiving solution can help achieve this. In this article, we'll delve into what a legal hold is, how legal holds were performed traditionally, and how email archiving solutions make the process simpler and efficient.

What is a legal hold?

A legal hold or litigation hold is the process used to preserve important communication that could be relevant in a legal proceeding that concerns the organization. Once a legal hold is issued and communicated to the stakeholders, relevant records, both physical and digital, must be preserved in a secure state, without any alteration or deletion. 

The legal hold process serves as a source of truth when the court orders certain evidence or data to be presented as part of an ongoing litigation. In these cases, the organization facing the proceeding needs to perform an eDiscovery search to locate the relevant data and produce them in court. 

By processing relevant data in accordance with the legal hold process, organizations can ensure that they are compliant with the court order and avoid any potential risk related to critical legal proceedings. The legal hold process is triggered as soon as the company is aware of any impending legal action. Once the process starts, the relevant data should not be deleted until the proceeding is over and the court lifts the order to hold the data.

The traditional legal hold process

Traditionally, triggering a legal hold event used to be done manually. This process takes place in a few steps. 

1. Based on the importance and criticality of the data, organizations used to preserve the data either by exporting and storing them as files on their system or by keeping a copy without deletion on their email provider.
2. In case a litigation comes up, the admin identifies the relevant evidence and requests those employees handling the evidence to keep them safe without altering or deleting them.
3. If the court mandates the data to be produced, the admin conducts an eDiscovery operation to locate and retrieve the data, which is then produced as evidence in court. 
   
   Over time, as data management and security concerns grew, organizations came to realize that the data management lifecycle and legal hold process had to be automated to make it more efficient because they faced numerous challenges.

Challenges faced in the conventional process

To understand the evolution of legal holds, it's important to know the challenges faced by admins in the conventional process. Let's take a look at them. 

Managing data across sources: As part of a litigation, admins might have to scour data across multiple sources such as email, chat, physical communication, and social media. Collaborating with multiple employees across the company to identify the source of the data and instruct them to preserve it is a cumbersome process. This is especially true when the number of employees and the volume of data is too high, further leading to a higher number of legal hold requests.

Ensuring compliance: It's vital that data be stored in certain formats, in a secure, tamper-proof format, to ensure compliance with industry-standard regulations. Further, if there's any data leak pertaining to a customer or a business partner, the organization may be held accountable due to non-compliance. With the traditional methods, files stored in a public system can be accessed by anyone, exposing them to risk of non-compliance and heavy penalties. 

Avoiding data spoliation: Data spoliation refers to the act of destroying any form of communication or data that could be of importance in a legal matter. It's crucial for organizations to ensure this doesn't happen. Sometimes, when employees hear of a proceeding, if they realize that some evidence might incriminate them, they might delete the data. In other cases, the deletion could be unintentional. Leaving the data in control of the employee increases such risk.

The role of email archiving in legal holds

Email archiving is the process of preserving emails in a secure, central repository in an immutable format to enable retrieval of data when necessary. This helps with eDiscovery and compliance purposes. The lifecycle of a legal hold can be managed more efficiently with an email archiving solution in place. Let's take a look at the role of archiving in triggering and maintaining a legal hold.

Secure repository of relevant emails

Email archiving solutions provide a secure archival storage space for emails. All of the emails are indexed with the relevant meta data, making the eDiscovery and legal hold processes much simpler. With an archiving solution in place, organizations can rest assured that their emails are safely stored. This is particularly useful because the emails in employees' mailboxes might be altered or tampered with in some way, either intentionally or accidentally. Having an archived copy of the emails ensures that a source of truth for the emails is maintained.

Automated legal hold management

Previously, whenever a request for providing evidence came up, organizations had to dig through years’ worth of emails to find the right ones and secure them as part of the legal hold. However, with an email archiving solution, the process of locating the emails as well as placing a legal hold on them is much simpler. Once a hold has been placed on emails, archiving solutions retain them even if the original retention period set by the admin is bypassed. The emails will be retained until the investigation these emails are associated with is over.

Compliance with regulatory laws

Archiving solutions help organizations comply with regional and industrial regulatory laws such as GDPR, HIPAA, FINRA, and others. Based on the laws that the organization needs to abide by, they can configure the retention period and other conditions for email retention. Failure to abide by these regulations exposes the organization to legal action. The ability to apply and lift legal holds without affecting other retention settings helps balance compliance with operational flexibility.

Reduced overhead for admins

Triggering a legal hold and seeing it through from start to end requires involvement from multiple teams in an organization. This includes the legal team, the IT admin, and the employees or the departments whose emails have to be maintained. Ultimately, it falls on the IT admin to coordinate the entire process. But this process is much easier when there's an archiving solution from which the emails can simply be retrieved and placed on hold. The coordination amongst multiple teams is more streamlined, and with support from the legal team, the emails can be handled accordingly. 

Comprehensive audit trails

Email archiving has become a must for most organizations. However, it's also important for companies to decide who gets to access their archiving portal and the level of access that must be provided. Because many sensitive actions—such as data deletion and export—can be done, each action has to be monitored and kept track of with utmost precision. With the logging and audit trails features available in most archiving solutions, all actions are recorded and can be retrieved if required. 

Improved scalability and management

When compared to traditional email archiving solutions, cloud email archiving is built to accommodate the increasing scale and volume of data as well as employees. With granular retention policies and legal hold management options, organizations can scale their archiving solution to the growing needs of their company. This helps manage the retention duration for different departments and employees without having to manually adapt to growing requirements. 

Best practices for legal hold with email archiving

While email archiving simplifies the legal hold process, there are certain practices that can be followed to make the process more efficient, simple, and faster. Let's take a look at some of them. 

Identify the scope

As soon as you realize that there's an inquiry in which some of your data will be found relevant, sit down with all of the relevant stakeholders and clearly define the scope of the hold. This includes identifying the different modes of communication used by the company, the employees whose data is to be secured, and the kinds of data to be secured. 

Defining a clear process document regarding this and issuing it across the organization ensures that there's no confusion as to what data is being held accountable. This also helps employees stay aware of which of their data is being processed and why. 

Identify the custodians

Custodians are the organization members who take charge of securing the data, possessing it, and controlling the flow of the information. Once the data is identified, they'll decide how to produce it to court and guard the data until the investigation is over. These members ideally need a certain level of technical expertise and an understanding of what's being requested of them. It's important to select an employee who'll be able to handle these processes as the custodian efficiently.

Define clear policies and guidelines

While issuing an org-wide announcement regarding the potential legal action and the evidence to be produced, outline an exhaustive document in which you list down the expectations and requirements from your employees. Mention that no relevant data can be deleted until the legal process is complete. Ensure that the policy for data handling and the guidelines for handling any relevant new data are clearly defined in the document. 

Communicating this to all departments and employees in the company is also crucial. Ensure that the policy is shared in a common place where all important announcements are made, and make it a mandatory read to get acknowledgement from all of your employees to ensure they're aware of what the policy mandates. 

Audit and review regularly

Once the policy has been established and is in effect, the onus is on the custodian to monitor if all of the relevant data is being held without any deletion or alteration. They need to regularly verify this by going through the audit logs in the email archiving portal to ensure that no other admin or the employee of the company is taking any action on the emails that are to be produced in the investigation.

If you find that some of the relevant data isn’t being retained, or if there are other gaps in the hold process, improve their efficiency by altering the guidelines and the scope. 

Update the stakeholders

Once the relevant evidence is requested to be produced in the court and the entirety of the legal proceeding is over, the data retained as part of the hold needs to be processed according to the guidelines and the mandate set by the court. If further retention of data is needed, set up a policy for the same. If not, the legal hold and investigation can be closed from your archiving solution. Following this step, the emails or other data will either be removed from retention or continue being archived based on the initial retention policy that is set by the admin. 

Wrapping up

Legal holds are an unavoidable part of doing business in today’s regulatory and litigation-heavy environment. While they can be complex and resource-intensive, email archiving offers a powerful way to streamline the process.

By centralizing email storage, enabling automated legal holds, and supporting advanced eDiscovery, email archiving not only helps organizations stay compliant but also significantly reduces legal risk and operational overhead. This makes it essential for any business seeking to fortify its compliance and legal response strategies.

eProtect is a cloud-based email archiving and security solution that provides email archiving for cloud and on-premise email providers. The solution offers secure email archiving, quick eDiscovery, and data export to ensure that organizations stay compliant and guarantee data security. eProtect is the archiving solution powering Zoho Mail, a platform trusted by millions of users.