Track and Modify a Legal Hold

Once a legal hold is issued, you can monitor and update it as appropriate. For example, you might need to export a report on the status of the hold, or edit the included questionnaire to request additional information. 

You can do these actions, and more, from the Legal Holds tab of the Organization home. Read this article to learn more about how to track and modify your legal hold.

To learn how to create a legal hold notice, see our Legal Holds: Hold Notices article.

Requirements

To update a legal hold, you must have Legal Hold Organization Admin or Organization Admin permissions and have permission to access the matter in which it is housed.

Legal hold notice actions

Once a hold is issued, you can:

• Track the acknowledgement status for each custodian, including released custodians
• Manually send notification, escalation, and reminder emails
• Issue the hold to additional custodians
• Edit the hold notice reply-to contact, hold notice email, escalation email, notification email, and reminder email
• Add or edit a questionnaire
• Export reports of legal hold activity
• Release some or all custodians from the legal holds tab
• Delete the legal hold

Access the Legal Holds tab

On the Legal Holds tab, you can see high level information about each hold notice.

To get to the Legal Holds tab, go to Organization home > Legal Holds.

On this tab, hold notices are nested under the matter they belong to. Expand a matter to see any hold notices within it. To find a specific hold notice, enter a keyword to filter.

You can filter by: 

• matter name
• Hold notice/data preservation name
• matter field name
• matter field values

The hold notice card displays all the high-level information about the hold notice object

• The status
• The total number of custodians
• The number of custodians who have not acknowledged and acknowledged the notice
• The number of custodians who have been released from the notice
• The directories used in creating the hold notice

To take action on a hold notice, select it. This takes you to the page for that hold notice. From here you can release the hold, add additional custodians, modify the hold notice emails, and manually send hold notice emails.

Hold notice page

The page for each hold notice lets you take actions to modify the hold notice, as well as export reports about the status of the hold.

Release all custodians

If you no longer need to have custodians under hold, or if you are preparing to delete the hold notice, you can release all custodians. To do so:

1. Select Release all custodians. This opens a dialog to configure the release.
   
2. Choose Send release notice emails to custodians or Don't notify custodians. If you decide not to notify, you cannot send release notice emails at a later date.
   
3. Select Continue to move on.
4. If you choose not to notify custodians, select Release now to release them. If you chose to send a release notice email, select Continue to move on to writing the release email.

5. Select Write release notice to start writing the notice. Use merge fields to personalize the notice.

   Note

   The person designated as the reply-to contact for the original hold notice is automatically designated as the reply-to contact of the release. To change this, see the steps below to change the reply-to contact. 

6. When you're done, select Done editing.
7. [Optional] Select Send test email > Send test now to send a test email to designated recipients. Your email is automatically added to receive it.
   
8. When you're ready, select Release & send emails.
9. Choose whether or not to send summary emails, and add any recipient email addresses for the summaries. Recipients receive a summary email including: 
   • The text of the release email
   • The date that the release was sent
   • The name of the associated matter
   • The custodians released

Delete a hold

A hold must be released to be deleted. 

Once the hold has been released, take the following steps to delete it:

1.  Select the three-dot menu, then select Delete hold notice.
   
2. Select I acknowledge the deleted hold notice cannot be recovered, then select Continue.
3. Choose whether or not to send summary emails and, if you decide to send summary emails:
   •  Decide whether or not to Export and attach custodian table with summary 
   • Designate the recipients. You are automatically added as a recipient.
     

4. Select Delete. This kicks off deletion, which removes all history and events associated with that hold notice.

   Important

   The only record of the hold notice is the creation and deletion in the Historic User Activity page.

Modify the legal hold

To modify the hold notice, you can:

• Issue the hold to additional custodians
• Edit the hold notice reply-to contact, hold notice email, escalation email, notification email, and reminder email
• Add or edit a questionnaire

Issue to more custodians

To add additional custodians to the hold notice:

1. Select the three-dot menu
2. Select Issue to more custodians. This takes you to the directory page.
3. Select the custodians. See the Custodians to issue section of the Legal Holds Notice article for more detailed instructions on how to select custodians.
4. Select Next to move on. This takes you to the Summary step. 
5. [Optional] Select Preview/Test emails to see and send tests of the hold notice email, auto-renotification email, auto-escalation email, and reminder email.
6. If everything looks good, select Issue & send emails.

Edit the hold notice and/or questionnaire

To edit the hold notice and/or questionnaire:

1. Access the edit dialog from one of two locations in the hold notice page. Either:
   • Select the three-dot menu and then Hold notice email and questionnaire
     
   • Go to Questionnaire responses and select View/Edit questionnaire
     
     Both options open the edit hold notice wizard, which contains three optional steps: Hold notice email, Questionnaire, and Send options.
2. [Optional] Make any edits to the hold notice email.
3. Select Next to move onto the questionnaire.
4. [Optional] Make any edits to the questionnaire introduction or questionnaire itself.
5. When ready, select Next to move to the Send options step.
6.  Choose between:
   • Do not send now: Custodians won’t receive a notification when you save your updates and will only receive the edited hold notice email in future communications
   • Send edited hold notice emails: Custodians who have not yet been released will receive the updated hold notice email upon saving your changes. Their acknowledgement status will be reset, and they will be required to acknowledge the new hold notice.
7. Select either Save or Save and resend emails, depending on your prior selection.

Change the reply-to contact

To change the person designated as the reply-to contact:

1. Select the three-dot menu, then select Reply-to contact.
   
   This opens the Edit reply-to contact dialog.
2. Enter the new contact's details in the Name and Email fields.
   
3. Select Save.

Change the auto-renotification, auto-escalation, or reminder settings

You can add or edit the auto-renotification, auto-escalation, or reminder settings for the hold notice. To do so, select the three-dot menu, then select which settings to edit.

This will take you to the page to edit those settings. For more detailed instructions on each, see the relevant section of the Legal Holds: Hold Notices article:

• Auto-renotification settings
• Auto-escalation settings
• Reminder settings

Custodians tab

The Custodians tab includes a table that displays the Custodian, Hold status, Acknowledgement status, and Communication history for each custodian. If the hold notice requires custodian acknowledgement for reminder notices, there is also a Reminder status column. This column displays the current state of acknowledgement for the most recent reminder.

Communication history contains a record of every event involving that custodian. An event is logged whenever:

• A hold notice is sent
• An Auto-renotification or manual renotification is sent
• An Auto-escalation or manual escalation is sent
• A Reminder email is sent
• A custodian acknowledges the hold, or an admin acknowledges a hold on their behalf
• A custodian is released from the hold 

Manually send renotify, escalate, release, or reactivate

From the Custodian tab, you can renotify, escalate, release, or reactivate custodians. To do so:

1. Select one or more custodians from the table.

2. Select Renotify, Escalate, or Release. If custodians have been previously released, you can select Reactivate. This opens the relevant email message.
   

   Note

   Sending a manual renotification or escalation message resets the automatic renotification or escalation cadence. This means that if automatic renotification messages are sent every 7 days, and a manual renotification message was sent 4 days after an automatic renotification, then it will be an additional 7 days before another automatic renotification message is sent.

3. [Optional] Select the message or Edit x message to edit it. When you're done, select Done editing to go back.
4. Select Send to send the message.

Acknowledge a hold notice on behalf of one or more custodians

Custodians do not always respond to email notifications about legal holds, and may instead respond in-person or in other formats. Admins can manually update a custodian's acknowledgement status and questionnaire responses so that the legal hold statuses in Everlaw can always reflect the actual status of the legal hold notice, and that questionnaire data can be complete even if a custodian doesn't fill out the questionnaire within Everlaw.

You can update the status for custodians individually or in bulk. When you update individually, you can also add responses for any questionnaires included in the legal hold notice. 

To update in bulk:

1. On the Custodians tab, use the checkboxes to select the custodians for whom to update the acknowledgement status.

   Note

   To be eligible, the custodian must have their current Acknowledgement Status set to NOT ACKNOWLEDGED.

2. Select the three-dot menu, then Manually mark as acknowledged. 
   
   This opens a dialog to enter the reason and to confirm the status change.
3. In the Reason for manual acknowledgement field, type in the reason that these custodians are being marked manually. The same entry will be used for all custodians selected.
   
4. When you're done, select Change. This updates the status of the custodian(s) and adds a visual indicator in the Acknowledgement status column that their status was marked manually.
   
   It also adds a new event to the Communication history column.

Update individually

When you update the status of a custodian individually, you can add responses to any questionnaire that was sent as part of the hold notice. You can also edit the questionnaire responses for any custodian that you updated manually through a bulk action. To update the status of an individual custodian:

1. In the Acknowledgement status column, select the status for the custodian whose status you want to edit. To be eligible, it can be either NOT ACKNOWLEDGED OR ACKNOWLEDGED with the manually updated icon.
   
   This opens a Manually mark as acknowledged dialog.
2. [Optional] If a questionnaire was included in the hold notice, you can manually enter responses here. To do so, select Edit questionnaire responses.
   
   This opens the questionnaire in a new tab, where you can fill out the responses on behalf of the custodian.
3. In the Reason for manual acknowledgement field, type in the reason that this custodian is being marked manually. 
4. When you're done, select Change. This updates the Acknowledgement status and Questionnaire status of the custodian, adds their responses to the questionnaire, and adds a visual indicator in the Acknowledgement status column that their status was marked manually. It also adds a new event to the Communication history column.

Edit manual acknowledgement status or questionnaire responses

Once you have manually updated a custodian's status, you might need to make later changes. To revert a manually acknowledged hold back to NOT ACKNOWLEDGED, or to edit the questionnaire responses of a custodian who you have updated manually:

1. Select their status in the Acknowledgement status column. 
   
   This opens a dialog to change the status.
2. [Optional] To edit questionnaire responses, select Edit responses. 
   
   This opens a new tab to update the responses.
3. [Optional] To reset the acknowledgement status:
   1. Select Revert manual acknowledgement. 
      
      This opens a dialog confirming that the Acknowledgement status will be set to NOT ACKNOWLEDGED, that any manually entered questionnaire responses will be cleared, and the Questionnaire status will be set to NOT RESPONDED.