Your single source for new lessons on legal technology, e-discovery, and the people innovating behind the scenes.

Discover What's New in Relativity Legal Hold

Dylan Salisbury

As the world becomes more automated, the margin for forgiveness of human errors becomes slimmer. There’s simply no excuse for missteps when a streamlined, more accurate solution is an increasingly viable option for so many business processes.

Consequentially, companies are faced with the growing pressure of indirect coercion: if they don’t automate, it will become increasingly challenging to remain competitive. Whether they like it or not, they now must find ways to innovate and bring more efficient and accountable processes to every corner of their businesses.

This is especially true for legal operations—including legal holds—where the volume, variety, and sources of data under scrutiny continue to increase and diversify at an alarming rate.

Relativity Legal Hold was developed to help in-house teams keep up with that alarmingly quick pace of change—and we’re continuing to innovate it as those needs evolve. Here’s a look at the latest and greatest in Legal Hold.

Greater Efficiency and Accountability

Traditional legal hold workflows—manually updated spreadsheets, disparate systems, and multiple stakeholders—are untidy, and with today’s data volumes they’re downright dangerous. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Our September 2019 release for Legal Hold will make it even easier to bring more accountability and efficiency to this critical process.

Task management, for example, is a new feature that will enable users to not only manage legal holds, but assign and manage tasks across their e-discovery platform.

As a result, any legal or litigation support professional can harness the power of Legal Hold to make sure important tasks—such as the collection of custodian data and interviews—are executed from the beginning of a legal hold project through the matter’s review.

For example, imagine a scenario where you need your staff to interview and collect cell phone data from certain custodians. You can use the questionnaire functionality in Legal Hold to notify them of these instructions and provide a channel for them to send any insight they discover right back to you—and right into Relativity.

This one-step feedback loop means the quality of your legal hold is no longer dependent on your employees’ judgment or diligence with inputting their information into the database.

Other Legal Hold features can be particularly helpful for those in highly regulated industries with long lead times on their legal matters, such as financial services or the pharmaceutical space.

Preserve-in-place, for instance, allows you to not only send out a preservation notice to employees—but automatically create and save a copy of the documents in question if a forgetful employee later edits or deletes them while the hold is still in place.  

With this tool in your kit, if the matter progresses to trial many months or even years after a related hold is first issued, you won’t have to cross your fingers and hope that employees have preserved everything to the letter. Ultimately, shrinking the opportunity for human error will help protect your team and your organization as the matter progresses.

Making the Most of Your Investment

Task management was developed as a direct response to customer feedback. We’re always looking for ways to improve our software to better meet the needs of our users, and many users were telling us that they were trying to use Legal Hold this way out of the box. There was a clear opportunity to make that smart strategy easier on them, so we went for it—and we can’t wait to see what teams like yours will do next.

The possibilities can go beyond litigation. Virtually any legal or compliance-related digital task you’re accountable for performing and documenting can be accomplished with Legal Hold. Whether that’s notifying relevant parties of a policy change, gathering signatures on your updated ethics policy, or issuing instructions related to your litigation matters, you’re no longer at the mercy of human error or malevolence. You’re also able to make the most of your existing software investments, instead of spinning up new subscriptions.

In short, Legal Hold can help you mitigate risks, cover bases, and check boxes with more automation, as few steps as possible, and Relativity’s top-notch built-in security.

The application is especially useful in tackling challenges related to data migration, scalability, and usability.

  • Scalable for teams of any size. Legal Hold usage isn’t limited based on user count, and it can be used independently of or in tandem with the broader platform. So whether you’re managing just a few simple processes with a small team or tackling the entire EDRM with a highly sophisticated in-house legal practice, Legal Hold can be a great fit.
  • Streamlined and secure data migration. If you need to migrate from a legacy tool or bring your team’s legal hold operations back in house, it is easy to migrate your existing data to Legal Hold. Relativity meets the stringent requirements of ISO 27001 compliance, the global standard for information security, so you can rest assured your data will be safe during and after the move.
  • A customizable and intuitive user interface. A straightforward interface is built into Legal Hold out of the box, but you can also easily customize it to fit your team’s needs and maximize your efficiency in the tool. Tailor it to suit your workflows, meet users’ look and feel preferences, and get you to what you need more quickly. There’s even a wizard to help walk you through how to get started.

That’s Not All, Folks

Just as RelativityOne receives constant updates and improvements, our team is hard at work giving Legal Hold the same innovative treatment. Stay tuned for news about how additional uses and features are coming to life as we continue to grow and evolve the tool to meet your changing needs.

Looking for more ways to leverage Legal Hold? Don’t hesitate to reach out to our team—we’d be happy to help you do it. You can start by finding some inspiration here, too.

Find More Ideas for Getting the Most out of Relativity Legal Hold


Dylan Salisbury is a product marketing manager at Relativity, where he specializes in understanding and serving the corporate community.

The latest insights, trends, and spotlights — directly to your inbox.

The Relativity Blog covers the latest in legal tech and compliance, professional development topics, and spotlights on the many bright minds in our space. Subscribe today to learn something new, stay ahead of emerging tech, and up-level your career.

Interested in being one of our authors? Learn more about how to contribute to The Relativity Blog.