The term “legal hold” tends to invoke an internal reaction – something akin to: ugh! Legal hold presents many challenges to an organization – the potential impact of lost time, equipment, and money. And, of course, how will the IT and Legal departments be able to pull a legal hold off with, um, grace? It’s a lot. Or at least it seems like a lot.
First, what is legal hold?
Simply put, legal hold – or preservation order – is “a process that an organization uses to preserve all forms of potentially relevant information when litigation is pending or reasonably anticipated.” With half of all corporate data distributed across company laptops (aka endpoints), it could make for a daunting task if a legal hold is placed on an organization.
In the past, when faced with a legal hold situation, organizations have had to deal with manually collecting the actual endpoint device – laptops, smartphones, and other endpoint devices – and quarantining them for the duration of the legal hold process. This caused undue stress on the IT department, to say the least.
The role of endpoint backup solutions
If an organization has an endpoint backup solution, they do not have to physically confiscate laptops, send employees into panic mode, or have another thing IT or the legal team needs to worry about. An endpoint backup solution provides a secure, scalable, and reliable approach to legal hold. By automatically and continuously collecting and preserving endpoint data, endpoint backup solutions streamline the legal hold process and ensure continuous access to business-critical files and data — without burdening IT teams or disrupting end-user productivity.
But IT is not the only department impacted when imposed with legal holds. The C-suite, Legal, and even Human Resources (HR) are stakeholders as well. They all want automatic, effortless endpoint data preservation for compliance, eDiscovery and offboarding – and of course, reduced overall risk to the organization.
How endpoint backup solutions streamline legal hold
In our new whitepaper, “How Endpoint Backup Makes Legal Hold Frictionless for IT, Legal, and the End User” learn how CrashPlan’s legal hold solution can help organizations seamlessly streamline the process. It no longer has to be manual or reactive – in fact, the legal team can initiate the process, no IT required. It’s one more way CrashPlan protects tomorrow’s success by preserving today’s productivity.
About the Author
