When a corporation anticipates a legal or regulatory action, it must act quickly to preserve potentially-relevant data. This often includes large volumes of both paper-based and electronically-stored documents, which can be difficult to locate, manage, and track. To prevent the loss of important data and maintain defensibility, the corporation must have a well-constructed legal hold policy, and an organized and efficient process for executing that policy. Method provides businesses with both the ability to execute on policy by designing and administering holds, as well as the tools necessary to assess business risk as part of developing a litigation preparedness strategy. 

Using Method, corporations can centralize and effectively manage legal holds. The general counsel’s office can send hold notices, distribute question sets, and monitor employee responses in real-time. Detailed reports can be generated to maintain complete and defensible audit trails by custodian, and alerts can be sent to HR and IT departments to make them aware of hold details. 

Legal hold needs differ among various business units and matters. To ensure these individual needs are met, Method provides the ability to customize question sets, hold notices, e-mail templates, and ESI source libraries to generate customized workflows that can be saved as templates and repeated. This flexibility allows users to perform and oversee multiple holds simultaneously, and eliminates the dependency on a single individual for information pertaining to the hold.
 

Method gives existing Relativity Premium Hosting Partners a powerful tool to help their clients overcome the varied challenges of successfully completing a legal hold or risk assessment. Serving as a compliment to partners’ consulting and collection services, this flexible and scalable application runs on Relativity and can be deployed as an add-on to a partner’s Relativity instance.

Using Method, providers can help their clients address the risks associated with managing the legal hold process. These risks typically result from a lack of organization, along with ineffective reporting and auditing capabilities during the hold. Method allows users to organize the hold process into a straightforward progression. Instead of using disparate, back-office tools, users can quickly initiate a legal hold and proceed with a structured workflow in a centralized, web-based application. They can easily send out legal hold notifications by e-mail, interview custodians, gather relevant information, track responses, and generate detailed reports to maintain a defensible audit trail.  

Method's flexible feature set allows providers to consult with clients to assess organizational risk with respect to litigation, investigative, and regulatory matters. Users can create customized question sets and e-mail templates to be saved as repeatable risk assessment workflows. They can also use Method's reporting capabilities to produce metrics on the information gathered to reveal trends and enable the implementation of policies.