Increased Litigation Is Exposing Legal Hold Gaps

Seventy percent of corporate counsel reported involvement in at least one regulatory proceeding in 2024, according to Norton Rose Fulbright’s 2025 Annual Litigation Trends Survey. That's up from 61% in 2023. Since almost half of all respondents expect the number of lawsuits and regulatory investigations to increase in the coming year, it's safe to assume that we're living in a period of rapidly growing litigation.

Traditional Legal Hold Processes Are Falling Short

Traditional legal hold processes — reliant on manual spreadsheets, siloed tools and teams, and disjointed email chains — have become liabilities. They are now a significant source of organizational risk, exposing public and private sector entities to spiraling costs and inefficiencies, compliance gaps, and the resulting penalties, such as sanctions, fines, and reputational blowback.

Organizations and government agencies must retain electronically stored information (ESI) that is increasing at a rate and scale that traditional legal hold processes can't handle. Not only is data growing, but it's also accumulating in communication tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack. Data and documents don’t just sit in one place waiting to be discovered either. People now primarily collaborate by sending document sharing links to each other, not attaching files to emails. 

This seemingly simple shift has profound implications for the implementation of legal holds because modern data is harder to determine and capture.

Files that legal teams must preserve may reside in completely different cloud ecosystems, such as Google Drive, SharePoint, or Box, with separate retention policies, access controls, and version histories.

As a result, legal teams must rely on their organizations' IT departments for every preservation and collection task. IT becomes a bottleneck, and legal teams lose the autonomy to act quickly, increasing risk, cost, and inefficiency.

Legal Concerns of Cybersecurity and Data Privacy

Cybersecurity and data privacy have become top litigation concerns for organizations, cited by 36% of respondents in the Norton Rose Fulbright survey as an area of increased exposure.

A single data privacy class action can trigger the need for an in-house legal team to preserve information from dozens of systems for countless individuals. If that team depends on legal hold tools and software that are not only inefficient but incapable of accounting for today’s complex web of interconnected data, the greater the risk of evidence spoliation, sanctions, and unfavorable court rulings.

Casepoint Legal Hold: From Manual Chaos to Automated Control

Casepoint Legal Hold empowers an organization’s in-house legal team to efficiently manage legal holds, preserve data, and ensure compliance and defensibility. It streamlines the legal hold process in several ways.

1. Automating Tasks

Casepoint Legal Hold automates workflows for notice distribution, reminders, and tracking, eliminating the manual steps most vulnerable to human error.

2. Streamlining Custodian Management

Casepoint Legal Hold orchestrates the entire custodian management process. It enables legal teams to add or remove custodians throughout the legal hold lifecycle easily and automates the tedious task of sending reminders.

For non-responsive custodians, the system can automatically send escalation notices to their managers, a proven method for improving compliance rates without manual intervention while boosting a company's defensibility. Critically, Casepoint can integrate with HR systems to detect and flag employee status changes — such as terminations or changes in title — thereby closing one of the most significant gaps in the manual hold process. 

3. Preserving Data Across a Sprawling Ecosystem

Casepoint Legal Hold connects directly to a diverse set of data sources that can include applications such as Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Workspace, and Box. This capability empowers legal teams to act immediately without relying on IT, thereby eliminating a significant bottleneck in the preservation process.

The ability to preserve data in-place is particularly powerful, as it secures potentially relevant information at its source without the need for costly, time-consuming, and risky data movement.

4. Improving Data Defensibility With a Credible, Centralized Audit Trail

Casepoint Legal Hold gives legal teams a real-time view of hold status, custodian compliance rates, and outstanding tasks. It meticulously logs every action taken within the system — from the initial notice issuance to every custodian acknowledgment, reminder, and escalation — creating a comprehensive, time-stamped audit trail that can be easily reported on and presented to a court to demonstrate a reasonable and good-faith preservation effort.

Modern Litigation Deserves a Better Legal Hold Processes

Reduce risk across your eDiscovery lifecycle, minimize the chance of sanctions, and lower downstream costs. Take the first step toward a faster, smarter, and more defensible legal hold process.