A legal hold serves two important functions. It notifies custodians that they’re responsible for preserving potentially relevant data. Also, and equally as important, a legal hold protects your organization.
Legal holds are extremely important — but your recipient may have never heard of one before. You understand the risks, the requirements, and the process for legal holds. But many people donʼt even know what they are, including most employees within your organization. Recipients of legal holds need clear explanations and directions so they can take timely and appropriate action.
Here are five essential tips for stronger legal hold communications.
3 Tips To Boost Custodian Compliance Rates
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Make It Obvious: Who It’s From and Why It Matters
If you’re sending legal holds by email, think about the first thing your audience sees: the sender and subject line. It determines whether the custodian will even open the legal hold email. And for good reason. With so much employee training surrounding phishing and suspicious emails, a legal email can be disregarded easily.
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Use a Recognizable Sender: A generic address like “legal@company.com” feels like spam. But if it comes from someone recognizable in the organization — it can help the notice feel more legitimate. Consider sending the legal hold from the lead attorney assigned to the legal matter. Tools like Casepoint Legal Hold can “spoof” the legal hold email sending address to improve open and compliance rates while not inundating the email inboxes of individuals in the legal department.
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Create a Clear, Action-Oriented Subject Line: Would you trust an email subject that said “Legal Hold” alone? Especially if you’ve never heard of a legal hold before? Vague subject lines don’t make it clear that action is required by the recipient. And if you can’t get custodians to open the legal hold email, you can’t expect them to acknowledge the legal hold or comply with its directions.
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Match Your Organization’s Branding
A legal hold notice should look like it’s coming from your organization.
Make sure your email includes the same branding as internal emails:
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Logo
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Header style
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Fonts and colors
A modern legal hold tool can customize and templatize email designs, so you don’t have to start from scratch with every new legal hold. A well-designed, branded legal hold template will build credibility and familiarity with your custodians, leading to an increase in open rates.
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Define the Scope
The notice communicates to custodians what data needs to be preserved for the matter at hand.
Here, specificity is crucial.
“Preserve your data from 2022 to 2024.”
What data? Just work data? What types? What does that even mean?
The notice should list categories of data sources — written documents, emails, photos, text messages, videos — be as specific as possible. For modern companies, it’s often emails and cloud storage, and possibly mobile device data if there’s a company phone involved.
Outlining the specific date range for the requested data is equally as important. If you aren’t explicit, custodians may fail to preserve what you need, undermining the defensibility of your legal hold. On the flip side, failing to provide a specific date range also increases the likelihood of over-preserving data.
Unclear instructions often lead custodians to preserve everything. This increases the legal risk to your organization, because preserved data is usually held longer than the standard data retention policy within the company and is therefore discoverable for other legal matters for longer than necessary. This drives up downstream eDiscovery costs, as more data must be collected and reviewed for your matter.
These Steps Aren’t Enough: Building on the Foundation
When you combine a recognizable sender, strong branding, and a right-sized scope, you’ve already eliminated some of the biggest barriers to custodian compliance. Yet most teams still struggle with issues that come later in the process: clarity of instructions, the right amount of detail, and how to structure the notice so it’s easy to act on.
These steps are only part of the picture. This blog shares a selection from our full whitepaper, which outlines additional strategies for stronger, more defensible legal holds.
Learn how leading legal teams are using better communication and automation to streamline legal holds and reduce risk.
Author
Product Marketing Manager
Lindsey Tsai brings energy and passion to her role as a Product Marketing Manager at Casepoint where she collaborates closely with Sales, Product, and Customer Success to ensure product delivery and support exceeds market expectations. She has worked extensively in the legal technology and eDiscovery space helping enterprise-level organizations…
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