Introduction to Legal Holds

Everlaw’s Legal Holds tool allows you to send hold notices to custodians in your organization and create data preservations on those custodians in Microsoft 365.

When it comes time to collect documents from your custodians, you can connect your legal hold custodians to documents uploaded in your Everlaw database.

You can create as many hold notices and data preservations on as many custodians as you like with no additional limits imposed by Everlaw.

The Legal Holds tool is designed to be managed at the organization level. 

Requirements

• Your organization must have an annual Everlaw subscription
• To create and modify legal holds, you must be an Organization Admin or a Legal Holds Organization Admin. To learn more, visit Manage Legal Hold Organization Admin Permissions.
• You must be an Organization Admin to assign a user Legal Hold Organization Admin permissions
• Users with Legal Hold Viewer permission can view, but cannot edit legal holds

Key terms

The following terms are important to understand Everlaw's legal holds tools:

• Matter: A space to house custodians and legal holds in the early phases, before documents are ready to upload.
• Hold notices: The communications you send to non-silent custodians. With hold notices, you can schedule automatic renotification and escalation notices, send periodic reminders, and track custodian acknowledgement.
• Data preservations:  Preservation-in-place hold objects created in external data sources, such as Microsoft 365. For Microsoft 365, you can create data preservations on your custodians in Everlaw and track the statuses of those data preservations without ever having to leave the Everlaw platform. For other software programs, you can use Everlaw's external data preservations to keep track of the data preservations you make in programs outside Everlaw.

Manage legal hold access permissions

The Legal Hold Org Admin permission allows users to access the Legal Holds tab of the Organization home page. They have full access to all legal hold directories, as well as access to any matters to which they have been granted permission. From those matters, they can access the hold notifications, and data preservations housed within them. 

Users who have Legal Hold Organization Admin but not Organization Admin permissions do not have access to any other organization level pages or permissions. 

Assign legal hold organization permissions

To assign legal hold organization permissions:

1. Go to your Organization home page.
2. Select Projects and Users.
3. Select the Users tab.
   All existing users are listed in the Users table.
4. If the user doesn’t exist yet, add them now via the + Add users button. Otherwise, continue to the next step.
5. Find the user you want to assign permissions to. 
6. Select the user's edit button in the table’s Organization admin permissions column.
   
7. Select either:
   • legal Holds Admin: Full access to legal holds
   • Legal Holds Viewer: Read-only access 

Access Legal Holds

All Legal Holds in an organization are listed on the Organization Admin page’s Legal Holds tab.

To access legal holds level:

1. Go to your Organization Admin Home page.
2. Select Legal Holds.
   This opens the Legal Holds dashboard page.

The organization level legal holds dashboard displays all the matters in your organization that contain legal holds. Expand the matter to see the legal holds within it.  This includes issued, drafted, and released hold notices, as well as drafted, pending, active, and released data preservations. Using the buttons at the top of the table, you can export a report of all holds in the organization.

You can filter down the displayed legal holds by keyword, matter status, hold status, and directory using the filter menu on the left side of the page. Filtering by keyword will search over matter names, labels, hold notice names, and data preservation names; however, it will not search over the text of legal hold notices. The export will always reflect what is displayed on this page, so filtering down the holds on the display will also filter down the holds included in the export.

You can change the sort order of your matters based on Name (A-Z or Z-A) or Accessed (recent first or recent last). For a legal hold, "accessed" means creating or editing a legal hold notice or data preservation. Adding or removing custodians within a matter does not count as accessing it.

You can also manage your Microsoft login for data preservations from the main Organization Legal Holds page by selecting the Manage data preservation login button at the top right of the page. From here, you can see which account you’re currently logged in as, log out, or log in. You can also log into Microsoft 365 during the process of creating a data preservation, described in the Microsoft Purview data preservations article. 

Create a new matter

When a new case is getting started, you might have a sense of the custodians involved and be ready to send hold notices or create data preservations. To house these legal holds, you can create a new matter from the Legal Holds tab. As part of creating the matter, you identify the relevant custodians from one or more of your directories. Once it's created, you can create a legal hold. 

To create a new matter from the Legal Holds page, select + New matter. This opens a dialog that guides you through the steps to create a new matter. 

For more details, see Create a Legal Hold Matter.

Create new legal holds in a matter

You create a new legal hold from within matter. To do this:

1. From the Legal Holds tab, select View on the matter you want to create a hold notice in.
   
2. From there, select +New and select the type of hold you want to create.

Here is information about each:

• New hold notice: Hold notices are communications you send to non-silent custodians. With hold notices, you can schedule automatic renotification and escalation notices, send periodic reminders, and track custodian acknowledgement. For more information, including instructions on how to create a hold notice, see our Legal Holds: Hold Notices article.
• New data preservation: Data preservations are preservation-in-place hold objects created in Microsoft Purview. You can create data preservations on your custodians in Everlaw and track the statuses of those data preservations without ever having to leave the Everlaw platform. For more information, including instructions on how to create a data preservation, see our Microsoft Purview Data Preservations article.
• External data preservation: An external data preservation allows you to create a record and track data preservations that you make and manage externally from Everlaw. For more information, including instructions on how to create an external data preservation, see our External Data Preservations article.

Import legal hold matter and database fields

You can bulk import legal hold custom field values for legal hold matters. This can save a significant amount of time when adding and/or updating field values across multiple matters.

Before you start: Confirm that all fields you want have already been created in Everlaw from the Database fields tab.

To import matter fields for one or more legal hold(s): 

1. Go to Organization home > Legal Holds.
2. Select the Import custom field data button.
   
   This opens the import field data wizard. There are two steps: Upload file and Summary. 
3. If you haven’t already, create a CSV file with the matter fields you want to import. This file should contain rows that represent matters on your organization’s Legal Holds page. To get started with a template (recommended), select Download CSV template.
   
   This template contains a complete list of all matters in column A, all existing custom fields in the organization as column headers (row 1), and previously defined field values in their corresponding column.
   Enter any new values that you want to add.
   
   You should apply the following formatting rules:
   • For multiple-select fields: Separate multiple field values in your CSV with commas enclosed within outer quotation marks.
   • For date fields: Use a yyyy/mm/dd format. If your date field also includes times, use a 24-hour format (e.g. 15:00 instead of 3:00 pm). Times will be uploaded in your local timezone.
4. When your file is ready for import, select browse to search for the CSV file on your computer, or drag and drop it into the dialog.
   
   This immediately moves you on to the wizard’s Summary step.
   
5. On the Summary step, you are shown a summary of your data uploaded in list form. Review this data for errors.
   If you find an error, select Previous to return to the previous page and reupload your corrected CSV file.
6. [Optional] For additional settings, select Edit Advanced settings.
   
   This opens the Advanced settings dialog. In this dialog:
   1. [Optional] In the Empty cells field, choose between: 
      • Don’t update existing field value (default): If the CSV contains an empty cell, the existing field value will not be updated
      • Delete existing field: If the CSV contains an empty cell, the existing field value will be cleared and left empty
   2. [Optional] In the Multiple-select fields field, choose between:
      • Replace existing field values (default): If the CSV contains values that are different from the current values, the field will be updated to contain only the new values
      • Add to existing field values: If the CSV contains values that are different from the current values, the field will be updated to contain both the current and new values.
   3. Select Save to close the dialog.

7. When you are ready to complete the import, select Submit.

Legal Hold directories

The Legal Holds Directories page displays all employee directories in the organization. All people in all directories are available to select from when creating a new hold notice or data preservation from the organization administration page. Admins can sort and filter, export reports, and take action on all custodians in these directories.

To access this page: 

1. Open your Organization home page.
2. Select Legal Holds > Directories.

Clicking on a custodian’s row in the directory table will bring up a custodian side panel containing information about all of the legal holds that custodian belongs to in the entire organization, grouped by matter or database. The custodian side panel is described in more detail in the Legal Holds Directories article.

Export legal hold information

You can export two CSV reports from your organization’s Legal Holds page:

• Filtered legal holds: A list of all legal holds and their associated data (e.g. hold name, status, custom field values) 
• Custodian summary: A list of all legal hold custodians mapped to a comprehensive report of their legal holds and associated properties

Filters applied to the Legal Holds page table are applied to all exports.

Export filtered legal holds

You can export a CSV report of all legal hold information for your organization. Each row represents one instance of a legal hold (hold notice, data preservation, or external data preservation).

The included information (column headers) is:

• Matter name
• Matter status
• Custom field values (each field has its own column)
• Hold name
• Service
• Data source
• Custodian status
• Issuer name
• Issuer email
• Total custodians
• Not acknowledged
• Acknowledged
• Released
• Errored
• Pending
• Active
• Released
• Directories
• First issued date
• Last issued date
• Legal hold type
• Release date
• Preservation start date
• Hold custom ID
• Hold version ID 
• Keywords
• Legal hold URL
• Project ID
• Matter notes
• Hold status

The export is sorted first alphabetically by Hold name. Then by Legal hold type (Hold notice, data preservation, external data preservation)

To download this report from your organization's Legal Holds page:

1. [Optional] Enter a keyword to filter down to a subset of holds to export. A keyword can be a matter name, label, hold notice name, or data preservation name.
2. Select the Export button. Then Export filtered legal holds (CSV). This initiates the download of the report.
   
   The exported CSV contains a list of all matters in column A, all existing value fields as column headers (row 1), and field values in their corresponding column.

Export custodian data

You can export a CSV report of all of the legal hold information associated with each of the custodians in your organization.

Each row of the report represents one instance of a custodian in a legal hold (hold notice or data preservation). If a custodian is included in multiple legal holds, each is represented in its own row. 

The included information (column headers) is:

• Issuer name
• Custodian directory
• Issuer email
• Custodian name
• First issued date
• Custodian email
• Last issued date
• Other emails
• Release date
• Matter name
• Business phone
• A column for each custom database/matter field
• Mobile phone
• Legal hold URL
• Fax number
• Legal hold type (hold notice or data preservation)
• Preferred language
• Hold name
• Company name
• Hold custom ID
• Role
• Hold version ID
• Department
• Service
• Office location
• Data sources
• Manager name
• Preservation start date
• Manager email
• Preservation end date
• Employee type
• Keywords
• Employee start date
• Custodian status
• Employee end date
• Acknowledgement status
• Custodian notes
• Acknowledgement date
• Project ID 
• Matter notes 
• Hold status

The export is sorted in the following order:

• First alphabetically by Directory
• Then alphabetically by Custodian name
• Then by Status order (Draft, Issued, Creating, Creation error, Nonexistent, Active, Releasing, Releasing error, Released, (No status), Pending (for EDP), and Error (for EDP))
• Then alphabetical by Hold name.

To download this report from your organization's Legal Holds page:

1. [Optional] Enter a keyword to filter down to a subset of holds to export. A keyword can be a matter name, label, hold notice name, or data preservation name.
2. Select the Export button, then Export custodian summary (CSV). This initiates the download of the report.
   

The image below shows a portion of a completed export:

Change matter status to inactive or active

Sometimes, a case for which your team has already identified custodians and created legal holds can pause indefinitely. You want to retain the work you've done, but don't want the paused matter to clutter your legal holds page. To support this goal, you can deactivate a matter. Using the Matter Status filter, you can hide all inactive matters so they no longer clutter your screen. To mark a matter inactive:

1. Before you can deactivate a matter, you must release all holds within it. See our Manage Legal Holds in a Matter article for instructions on how to release all holds.
   If the option to deactivate a matter is grayed out, it is likely because there is still at least one hold still active within it.
2. On the Organization home > Legal holds page, find the matter you want to mark as inactive and select the three-dot menu > Deactivate matter.
   
   You can also select the three dot menu from within the matter.
3. This immediately marks the matter as inactive.
   

Here are a couple other details about matter status:

• All status changes are marked as events on the Organization home > User Access History page, and are available via exports
• Changing the status of a matter that has been promoted to a database (marked on the Legal Holds page as Matter Database) has no impact on the database. Users can still upload and review documents even if the matter is inactive.