What Is A Legal Hold?

Unlike some other eDiscovery processes, a legal hold reaches far beyond your legal department and can potentially impact personnel across your whole business.

The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) was developed to improve standards and set guidelines in the eDiscovery process. Created by George Socha and Tom Gelbmann, the  EDRM illustrates the sequence of eDiscovery activities relating to a specific legal matter.

The events of 2020 highlighted two major challenges that modern in-house legal teams face. First, there has been an explosion of data sources across most organizations. From team collaboration platforms (Slack, MS Teams, etc.) and video conferencing tools (Zoom, Google Meet, Cisco Webex), to mobile text messages, company websites, and social media accounts, companies are faced with new kinds of ESI being generated in real-time throughout their organizations. 

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been law for three decades (it turned 30 in 2020), but it’s fair to say that the world has changed considerably since it was first enacted in 1990.

In a world where more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day, the eDiscovery process isn’t only complex and time-consuming, but it can be extremely costly as well. The challenge begins with how much data businesses create each day and is then compounded by the various structured and unstructured formats that data is made up of.

Optical character recognition (OCR) offers organizations the opportunity to get a much better digital handle on the information they store.

As with web archiving, social media archiving enables enterprises to collect and retain the content they share across social media platforms for future use and reference. It is an essential measure to help ensure that businesses can meet changing compliance requirements, resolve litigation issues, and maintain solid data governance.

In a previous article, we discussed the importance of protecting your website content from intellectual property (IP) theft. By keeping a complete archive of your website—including all edits and deletions—it becomes much easier to prove that original content from your site has been stolen by another party.

Working from home is an increasingly common reality for workers across a wide range of sectors. While remote working presents the opportunity for a better work-life balance, can increase productivity levels, and even save your company money, it also brings a unique range of challenges for HR teams.

Social media might seem like a lawless environment where cruel comments and reckless libel are simply the order of the day—but there have been instances where courts have classified social media posts and comments as defamation. This is true both in a country like the UK, where defamation is generally easier to prove, and the US, where the legal threshold is much higher.