Manage Legal Holds in a Matter – Knowledge Base

On Everlaw, legal hold notices and data preservations are housed within matters. The Organization Legal Holds page lists each matter that contains at least one legal hold and allows you to access a details page to manage and take action on them. This article describes the details page and all the actions you can take on your matter related to legal holds.

To learn how to create a new matter to house legal holds, see our Create a Legal Hold Matter article.

Requirements

To modify a matter, you must:

Be an Organization Admin or Legal Holds Organization Admin
Have permission to access the matter. See the Manage matter permissions section for more details about matter permissions.

Access the details page

The page for a matter contains all the information about all the legal holds within it and lets you take actions on them. To access the details page for a specific matter from the Organization Legal Holds page, select the View button for that matter.

Use this page to understand and manage the current legal holds and custodians, and to create new legal holds. This includes actions to:

Add more custodians
Create new legal holds
Modify existing holds
Export reports on holds and on custodians

The main details page has three additional tabs to support these functions: Legal Holds, Custodians, and Notes.

Main details page

On the main page for each matter, you can take several actions in support of managing the matter:

Create a new legal hold to house within the matter. See the Create a new legal hold section for details and instructions.
Add custodians to the matter. If you want to include a custodian in a legal hold within the matter, you must add them first. To do so, select + Add custodians. From there, you can select custodians manually or add in a pre-selected subset. See step 12 in Create a Legal Hold Matter for detailed instructions on how to do so.

The three-dot menu has additional functionality for matters:

Manage permissions to determine which Admins can access the matter: See Manage matter permissions section for detailed instructions.
View or edit custom matter fields: See Organization Admin: Database Fields for detailed instructions.
Rename the matter: To do so, select the three-dot menu, then select Rename matter. Type in the new name, then hit enter on your keyboard or click out of the field.
Release all the custodians from all legal holds in the matter: See the Release all legal holds section for detailed instructions
If all holds have been released and/or deleted, you can delete the matter. To do so, select the three-dot menu, then Delete matter. warning: permanent

Create a new legal hold

On Everlaw, a legal hold can be:

A hold notice that alerts a custodian about the hold and can include a questionnaire to collect additional information
A Microsoft Purview data preservation to create a preservation-in-place for Microsoft data via an integration between Everlaw and Microsoft
An external data preservation record of a data preservation created in a third party tool/platform

To create a new legal hold:

Make sure you're on the details page for the correct matter. From the Organization Legal Holds tab, find the relevant matter and select the View button to navigate to the page for it.
From the details page for the matter, select +New, then choose the legal hold that you want to create: Hold notice, Data preservation, or External data preservation.
Continue with the steps to create the legal hold:

Manage matter permissions

When the Restrict access permissions setting is enabled, Admins with access to the matter can designate which Organization and Legal Hold Organization Admins also have access. If an Admin is not explicitly granted access to a matter with access permissions enabled, they cannot see that matter listed on the organization’s Legal Holds page. To update the settings:

From the matter's details page, select the three-dot menu, then select Manage matter permissions. This opens the Manage matter permissions dialog.
[Optional] 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:

Select + Grant permissions.

An input box appears at the end of the list of users.
Select the user(s) to grant permissions to.

Then close the list by clicking outside of it or hitting Esc on your keyboard.
Select Grant.

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

When you're done, select Done.

Release all legal holds

When custodians no longer need to be under hold, you can release all holds at once. This preserves the record and history of each hold, but updates the status to Released. To release all legal holds in a matter:

From the matter's details page, select the three-dot menu, then select Release all legal holds. This opens the Release all legal holds in matter dialog to the Hold notice settings step, which lists the active hold notices within the matter.
If you want to send emails to the custodians notifying them that they have been released, select Send release notice emails to custodians.
If you don't want to send a notice, select Don't notify custodians.
To send a confirmation email of the action to designated admins, keep Send confirmation emails selected and select recipients to the Recipients entry box.
If you don't want to send a confirmation email, deselect Send confirmation emails.
Select Next to move onto the Data preservations settings step.
Review the list of data preservations. If there are any external data preservations, you can choose whether or not to release them.
Keep Include external data preservations selected to mark these as released.
To exclude external data preservations, deselect Include external data preservations.

Note

Since you create an external data preservation as a record of a data preservation created outside of Everlaw, this does not update the status of the data preservation in the tool where it was created.
If you selected to send release notice emails in step 2, Select Continue to move on to writing the release notice for the hold. See [link to legal holds notice article release notice step] for detailed instructions on how to do so.
Otherwise, select Release all now to release all the custodians.

Delete a matter

When all holds have been released, you can delete the matter and the holds within it.

Important

Deleting a matter is final and permanent. We don't recommend deleting a matter unless it was made as a test or in error. To hide a matter that is no longer active, you can deactivate it, and then filter your Legal Holds page to just the active matters.

To delete the matter:

If a matter is still active, you first need to deactivate it. From the Legal Holds page or the matter detail page, select the three-dot menu, then select Deactivate matter.
See the Change matter status to inactive or active section of our Introduction to Legal Holds article for more details about matter status.

Note

All holds in a matter must be released before a matter can be deactivated.
Once a matter is marked as inactive, you can delete it. Select the three-dot menu, then select Delete matter. This opens the Delete matter dialog.
Select the checkbox next to I acknowledge the deleted matter, along with its hold notices, data preservations, and external data preservations, cannot be recovered.
Select Continue to move onto the next step.
Make choices on each of the following options. By default, they are all selected. Deselect the checkbox for any that you do not want to include:
- Send a summary email per deleted hold notice, data preservation, and external preservation
- Export and attach custodian table with hold notice deletion summary
- Export and attach custodian and activity tables with data preservation deletion summary
- Export and attach custodian table with external data preservation deletion summary
Select Delete. This permanently deletes the matter.

Legal holds tab

The Legal Holds tab lists all the hold notices and data preservations in the matter, along with information about the custodian status.

There are a few actions you can take from this tab:

To go to the page for a given legal hold, select View in its row. This takes you to the details page for that specific hold. To learn more about the actions you can take from the page for a given hold, see the following:
To export the legal holds from this matter, select Export legal holds. This exports a CSV with one row for each hold in the matter. The column headers have high-level information about the status of the hold and the number and status of custodians for each hold.

Custodians tab

The Custodians tab lists all the custodians added to the matter.

From this tab, you can add any custodian or subset of custodians to a new or existing hold notice or data preservation.

A custodian that is added to a data preservation without being sent a hold notice has a SILENT flag next to their name

A custodian who is not associated with any legal holds has a NO HOLD flag.

From this tab, you can select custodians to take action on them. When one or more custodians are selected, buttons with the possible actions appear at the top: Issue hold notice, Add to data preservation, and Export report.

Once one or more custodians are selected, you can:

Issue a new hold notice or add them to an existing one. To issue a hold for the selected custodian(s), select Issue hold notice.

Then:
1. To add them to an existing hold notice, select Existing hold notice.
2. To add them to a new hold notice, select New hold notice. Then follow the instructions to create a hold notice.
Add them to a new data preservation or to an existing one. To add the selected custodians to a data preservation, select Add to data preservation.

Then:

To add them to an existing data preservation (external or Microsoft Purview), select Add to existing data preservation. Then choose the data preservation to add them to.
To add them to a new data Microsoft Purview preservation, select Create new data preservation. Then follow the steps to create a Microsoft Purview data preservation.
To add them to a new external data preservation, select Track in new external data preservation. Then follow the steps to create an external data preservation.

Export a CSV report that includes a row with the name of each custodian and a column header for any flags (NO HOLD or SILENT). To export a CSV report for one or more custodians, select Export report.

This downloads the CSV report.
[For custodians with a NO HOLDS flag: Remove them from the matter. To do so, select the three-dot menu, then select Remove from matter.

Notes tab

The Notes tab includes information about the matter, if any has been added. Notes are helpful to add context and additional information about the issues at hand for Admins working on the matter.

Select Edit to update the Notes field.