Preserve the right emails: Legal hold with eProtect
When litigation is on the horizon, one deleted email can change everything. eProtect's legal hold ensures that the emails your organization needs for investigations, audits, and legal proceedings are preserved exactly as they are—unaltered, undeleted, and always accessible.
What is legal hold?
Legal hold is a process that preserves specific email data when litigation or regulatory investigation is ongoing. It prevents tampering of emails, even if users attempt to alter them.
eProtect enables organizations to enforce legal holds seamlessly, ensuring compliance without disrupting everyday operations.
Why are legal holds important?
Protects against data loss
Maintains compliance
Strengthens legal defense
Minimizes operational disruption
Reduces litigation costs
When are legal holds applied?
- Civil litigation
- Regulatory investigations
- Compliance audits
- Internal HR investigations
- Contract disputes
Key features
Everything your legal team needs for defensible, court-ready email preservation.
Tamper-proof preservation
Emails under a legal hold cannot be deleted or modified by any user, including administrators. This ensures the integrity of evidence and protects your organization from spoliation claims.
Overrides retention expiry
Even if an email's retention period ends, a legal hold preserves it. Archival policies and legal obligations are managed independently, so one never compromises the other.
Granular search before hold placement
Use eProtect's filtering capabilities to scope your hold precisely. Filter by sender, recipient, date range, subject, keywords, attachment data, and more, so your holds are targeted.
Multiple holds per investigation
eProtect lets you create multiple holds within a single investigation, each with its own set of conditions and custodians, giving your legal team full control over the evidence.
Organization, user, and department-level holds
Apply holds on your entire organization or at a granular level. Whether you need to hold one person's emails or an entire team's communications, eProtect handles it all from one place.
Comprehensive audit logs
Every action taken within an investigation is recorded in eProtect's audit logs with timestamps and the email address. This creates a defensible, court-ready record of your legal hold process.
Export in legal-ready formats
Export held emails in ZIP or PST format for easy production to legal teams, regulatory bodies, or courts. The exported files and completion status can be tracked from one place.
AES 256 encryption at rest and in transit
All archived and held emails are encrypted with AES 256, both while being stored and in transit, ensuring that sensitive evidence remains secure throughout the legal hold lifecycle.
How do you apply a legal hold in eProtect?
Six simple steps from investigation to resolution.
Create an investigation
Open an investigation to house all searches, holds, and exports for the legal matter.
Define your search
Filter archived emails by date range, keywords, attachments, and preview results.
Place the hold
Lock the identified emails in place to ensure that the emails can't be deleted or altered.
Tag and organize
Categorize held emails with custom tags to keep evidence organized.
Export for legal production
Download held emails in ZIP or PST format, ready for legal counsel, auditors, or courts.
Release the hold
Once the matter is resolved, release the hold to return emails to their retention period.
Who uses legal holds?
Frequently Asked Questions
A legal hold is applied on certain emails when there's an ongoing or anticipated investigation as part of which the emails may need to be produced as evidence in court.
A legal hold typically lasts as long as the investigation or the litigation that the email is being held for is complete.
Legal holds are placed on emails to ensure that they're not tampered with any way. Therefore, emails that are held can't be modified or deleted.
All metadata related to the held emails are subject to the legal hold. This includes all sender, recipient information, attachments, URLs, email content, and other metadata.
All emails that are archived in eProtect are secured with AES 256 encryption at rest and in transit. When a legal hold is placed, the emails are retained until the hold is removed, irrespective of the retention period of the emails.
When a legal hold is placed on emails, the held emails will be retained for as long as the investigation is complete and closed, irrespective of the retention policy the emails fall under.
