Legal Holds Directories

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Adding single custodians
• Importing a CSV of custodians
• Viewing and editing custodian information
• Importing Microsoft custodians during data preservation creation

Introduction

In Everlaw, the recipients of legal hold notifications are known as data custodians or simply custodians. Later, when documents from these custodians are uploaded to the database, these custodians will become regular Everlaw custodians that are stored in document metadata and searchable in the query builder. The process of linking custodians from legal holds to uploaded documents is covered in Connecting Legal Holds to Uploading Documents section of the Introduction to Legal Holds article.

Custodian information is stored on the Directory tab of the Legal Holds page. You can add just the custodians to whom you plan to send legal holds, or you can upload entire directories and select the people that will receive hold notifications and become custodians later.

To add people to your directory, click on the “Add people” button in the upper right, then select whether you want to add a single person or import many people from a CSV file.

Adding single custodians

To add people one by one, fill out the side panel of properties that pops up, then click Add. The only required field for adding a person is the person's email address, and all email addresses must be unique. However, please note that if a person's manager email field is not filled out, Everlaw will not be able to send automatic escalation notices to that person's manager.

Importing a CSV directory

If you want to add multiple people at once, you should add people by CSV. To do so, first download the CSV template provided on the CSV upload page.

Once you’ve ensured that your CSV of user data is in the required format, upload your CSV to the page and follow the instructions in the wizard to map CSV column headers to people properties. Everlaw will automatically detect the following columns in your CSV: name, email, other emails, business phone, mobile phone, fax number, preferred language, company name, role, department, office location, manager name, manager email, employee type, employee start date, employee end date, and notes. Any other columns in your CSV will automatically be mapped to and stored in the Notes field. 

In order to import, an included column must be mapped to the “Email” field. If your CSV includes a person whose email address already belongs to another person in the database, you’ll be taken to an “Overwrite settings” step. Here, you’ll need to select whether you want to overwrite existing custodians. You can also choose to overwrite values only if the new values aren’t blank.

You can also set up an automatic import of a CSV to your directory using Everlaw's legal hold directory API. For instructions on how to set up this import, please refer to our API documentation.

Viewing and editing people properties

After upload, all people will be displayed in a table on the Custodians tab. Clicking on the person's row in the table will bring up a side panel where users can view and edit the properties associated with that person. This side panel also contains information about the legal holds in the database that the person is under.

If a person has not yet been added to any issued legal holds, you will also see a Delete button at the bottom of the side panel. Click on this button to delete the person from the database.

Importing Microsoft custodians during data preservation creation

When creating a Microsoft data preservation on Everlaw, Everlaw will automatically detect which of these custodians exist in your Microsoft organization. If any detected custodians exist in your Microsoft organization but have not yet been added to the Everlaw directory, you will see a warning page where you are given the option to can automatically add them to the directory.

The directory entry will be populated with the custodian’s first and last name, primary email address, manager name, and manager email address, taken from your organization's Azure Active Directory (Entra ID).

If any of the custodians in your organization have a Microsoft User Principal Name (UPN) that differs from their email address, we will still be able to identify that custodian and add them to the directory with the correct email address. You will be able to enter either the UPN or the email address, and we will correctly populate the email field with the custodian's email address.