Create a Legal Hold Matter

On Everlaw, a matter is a space to organize custodians and legal holds (notices and data preservations) as part of an investigation or in the early phases of litigation. When it's time to collect documents as a result of these holds, the matter can be promoted to a database to additionally house the documents for review.

You should create a matter on Everlaw when there is a need to start creating legal holds, or when you have defined an initial set of custodians who might be relevant to an upcoming legal matter, but you haven't yet collected any data for the legal matter.

This article describes how to create a matter.

For information on how to create legal holds within matters, see the following articles:

• Hold notice
• External data preservation
• Microsoft 365 data preservation

For information about working with an existing matter, see Manage Legal Holds in a Matter or Database

Requirements

To create a matter, you must be an Organization Admin or Legal Holds Organization Admin.

Create a new matter

A matter is a space to organize custodians who belong to a given legal matter or investigation, and to create and organize legal holds related to them. 

To create a new matter:

1. To access the organization Legal Holds page, go to Organization home > Legal Holds.
2. From the Legal Holds page, select + New matter. This opens the New matter dialog that guides you through the steps to create a new matter.
   
3. On the Settings step, enter a name for your matter in the Matter name field. 
4. Choose the time zone for your matter in the Timezone dropdown.
   
5. Select Next to move onto the Custom fields step.
6. Enter values for any custom fields that your organization has created. Fields with a * are required.
7. When you're done, select Next to move onto the Permissions step.
8. On the Permissions step, you determine which Admins should have access to this matter.  The setting is enabled by default, and all current Organization Admins are automatically granted access permissions, unless explicitly removed. Legal Hold Organization Admins are not granted permissions by default.
   
   [Optional] Disable/Enable this permission: To do this, switch on or off Restrict matter permissions. When Restrict matter permissions is off, all Organization Admins and Legal Holds Organization admins can access the matter.
   

[Optional] When the toggle is on, you can choose to grant or revoke permissions:
To grant permissions:

1. Select + Grant permissions.
   
   An input box appears at the end of the list of users.
2. Select the user(s) to grant permissions to.
   
   Then close the list by clicking outside of it or hitting Esc on your keyboard.
3. Select Grant.
   

To revoke a user’s permissions, select the revoke permissions button in the user’s row.

9. Select Next to move onto the Notes step.
10. [Optional] To add information about the matter, such as additional context or potential legal issues related to the matter, enter notes or a description in the Notes field.
    
11. When you're done, select Continue. 
12. This takes you to the Custodians step to select the custodians to include in the matter. You can select custodians manually or add in a pre-selected subset.
    Select custodians manually: Select the checkbox next to the name of each custodian to include. If you have multiple directories, you can filter to only the relevant one(s) under Filter by directory.
    
    Paste or upload from a specific directory: If there is a specific directory from you which you want to paste or upload a list of custodians:
    1. Select Paste or upload from one directory. This opens a dialog to select the directory.
       
    2. To select a directory, select one from the Directory dropdown.
    3. To add the custodians from the directory, you can either:
       1. Paste the list of email addresses into the text box
       2. Upload a CSV with one column of email addresses
    4. When you're done, select Next.
       The custodians whose email addresses match those in the selected directory are selected as custodians.  
13. When you're done, select Continue. This creates the new matter. See the Database/matter details page article for details about the page and to learn how to create a legal hold within it.