Legal hold notifications from Everlaw include the initial hold notice for custodians to acknowledge and any subsequent re-notifications, escalations, and reminders. By default, these are sent from notifications@everlaw.com, but you can customize the email address that Everlaw legal hold notifications are sent from.
Customizing the email address lets your organization send these notifications from an email address using your own organization's email domain. When you send a legal hold notification from a familiar domain, it is more likely to be identified by recipients (custodians) as legitimate and important, and less likely to be ignored or sent to spam.
This article describes the steps to configure a custom email address from which your Everlaw legal hold notifications are sent.
Note
This configuration is limited to sending emails related to legal holds. Configuring a custom email address using the steps in this article does not affect any other emails that come from notifications@everlaw.com.
How it works
When you create a legal hold notice on Everlaw, each custodian receives emails (notifications) related to the legal hold.
If you want your notifications to come from an email address with your own organization's email domain, you can set it up from the Organization home > Legal Holds > Settings tab. Once you enter and verify the email address, you add information that Everlaw provides you with to your email domain's DNS records. This configuration step then allows Everlaw to send emails with the designated email address set as the From value for all legal hold notifications.
The information to configure your DNS records uses a custom subdomain with the format "everlaw-lh.yourdomain"
The setup and authentication process for configuring the DNS records only allows Everlaw to send emails using the designated email address from the subdomain. Everlaw cannot access any email address from your organization's top-level domain.
Requirements
- You must be an Organization Admin or Legal Holds Organization Admin in Everlaw
- You should know in advance which email address you want to use. We recommend setting up an email address specific to legal holds, such as "legalholdnotifications@company.com"
- To finish configuring the custom email address, you must access your email service provider's DNS records. It is likely that you will need support from your organization's IT department to complete this step.
Set up the custom email address
To set up the custom email address in Everlaw:
- Go to Organization home
> Legal Holds > Settings.
- On this page, in the Send emails from section, select Edit.
This opens the Edit sender email address dialog where you set the custom email address. - Select Custom email address.
-
In the Sender email address field, enter the email address that you want to use.
Note
The email address must be a pre-existing email address that you can access for verification.
- [Optional] In the Sender display name field, enter the display name for the email. The value you enter here will appear as the name of the sender of the email.
- When you're done, select Save. This takes you to the Verify sender email address dialog with additional information to finish configuring the email.
- The Verify sender email address dialog has two action items:
- Verify the email address
- Use the DNS records to configure your email domain's DNS records
Note
You can select OK to close this dialog without taking either action. When you do so, the update remains in a pending state. Select View instructions at any time to take either action.
Verify email address
When you're ready, here's how you verify the email address:
- In the Verify sender email address dialog, select Send verification email.
This sends an email with a link that you click to verify that you have access to the email inbox. The link expires after 24 hours. - Go to the inbox of the email address and open the email with the subject Confirm your legal hold sender email address.
- Click the link.
- This completes the first action item.
Once the email is verified, use the information for the MX and TXT values to configure your DNS records. See the Configure the DNS records section for more details.
Configure the DNS records
For Everlaw to send DMARC compliant legal holds emails from a custom email address, your organization needs to make changes to allow AWS SES (the email service that Everlaw uses to send emails) to send emails from the custom subdomain that Everlaw uses for you.
This is necessary to pass the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) authentication.
To do so, you add the custom MX (mail exchange) and TXT values generated in step 6 when you set up the custom email address to your email domain service provider's DNS records. The exact instructions for how to do so vary depending on your domain service provider.
If you do not have access to your email provider, or do not know how to update the DNS records, contact the IT department at your organization.
Important
Once you enter the information, it can take up to 72 hours for the DNS records to update, depending on your email provider. Any legal hold notifications sent during this time will be sent from the default email address.
Send legal hold notices
Once your email provider's DNS records update, all legal hold notifications will come from the newly configured email address.
When you create a new legal hold notice, the new email address is automatically set as the From value.
While this email address is the From value for every legal hold notification in your organization, you can set a separate Reply-to value for each legal hold notice, so that communications for specific legal holds can be handled by designated individuals.