External Data Preservations

Organization Admins and Legal Holds Organization Admins can create external data preservation records in Everlaw to track data preservations that are managed externally. This is useful if you are preserving data in services that Everlaw currently doesn’t have a direct API support for, such as Slack or Google, and you want to make sure you keep a record of these data preservations in Everlaw. External data preservations recorded in Everlaw allow your team to track all data preservations, and which matter or database they relate to, in a single place.

Table of Contents

• Create a new external data preservation
• View or modify an existing External data preservation

Create a new external data preservation

Required permissions: Organization Admin or Legal Holds Organization Admin with access to the matter/database the data preservation is housed in.

Whenever you create a new data preservation in a tool outside of Everlaw, you can make a record of it in Everlaw, as an external data preservation. To do so:

1. From the Organization Legal Holds tab, select View on the matter/database you want to create a hold notice in. Consider the following:
   • If you create your legal hold with a database, the legal hold will also show up in the Legal Holds tab for that database. Database admins will be able to view information about it.
   • Matters allow you to create a hold notice without associating it with an Everlaw database.
     You should leverage matters instead of databases when creating legal holds for a particular investigation ahead of data collection. Later on, should you need to collect data, you can promote the matter to a database. 
     
2. From the main page for the database/matter, select +New and then External data preservation.
   
   This opens the New external data preservation dialog.
3. In the Name field, enter a name for the external data preservation.
4. Select Continue.
5. Select the Custodians to include. 
6. When you're done, select Next.
7. [Optional] Provide additional details about the data preservation. You can:
   1. Enter the Service (software application) that the preservation was created in
   2. Write a Description of the data preservation
   3. Enter the Query, including a date range and keywords as a record of what you used to initially create the data preservation 
   4. Designate an Initial marked status for these custodians. By default, all custodians are marked as “Active.”
8. When you're done, select Next.
9. Confirm the information on the Summary page. If everything looks good, select Create. Otherwise, select Previous to return to the previous step and make edits.

View or modify an existing External data preservation

Required permissions: Organization Admin or Legal Holds Organization Admin with access to the matter/database it's housed in.

Once you have created an external data preservation you might need to view or edit it. Once it's created, you can add, remove, and edit the status of custodians, edit the details of the data preservation, and export activity related to the data preservation.

To view or modify an external data preservation:

1. Go to the Legal Holds tab of the Organization home. 
2. Select the caret button next to the matter name that the data preservation was created under.
3. Select the data preservation you want to view under the Data preservation section. It has an EXTERNAL tag on it.

To access an external data preservation from a project within the database that houses the data preservation, go to Data transfer > Legal Holds and choose the preservation.

When you view an external data preservation, there are separate tabs for Custodians, Details, and Activity.

You can add more custodians or delete the preservation from any tab.

To add more custodians:

1. Select Add more custodians. This takes you to the Custodians to include page used to create the initial external data preservation. 
2. Choose the custodian(s) to add.
3. Select Next.
4. [Optional] Choose the Initial marked status for the custodian(s) you are adding.
5. Select Add.

To delete the external data preservation, select the three-dot menu and select Delete external data preservation.

The Custodians tab lists the list of custodians included in this data preservation and their status. From here you can edit the status of each custodian individually or in a batch.

To edit a custodian's status individually, select their status in the Marked status column, and select a new status.

To edit the status of multiple custodians at once:

1. Select the custodians whose status you want to edit.
2.  Select Mark status and choose the new status.
   

To remove multiple custodians at once:

1. Select the custodians you want to remove.
2. Select the three-dot menu , and select Remove from external data preservation.
   

In the Details tab you can view the  Service, Description, and Query that were entered when this external data preservation was created. To edit this information, select Edit.

The Activity tab tracks:

• The initial creation of the data preservation 
• Any time a custodian is added
• When a custodian is removed
• When a custodian's marked status is edited
• When the details (service, description or query) are edited

For each event, the Date, User, and Event is recorded.
You can filter by date range to focus on activity in a specific time frame.

Select Export to download a spreadsheet of this activity.