Who Uses Method?

Corporations

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.

Using Method’s customizable question sets and reporting tools, corporations can determine which custodians fit the scope of a matter, and therefore which documents must be preserved. Question sets and reporting can also be used to assess business risk for litigation preparedness through data mapping and analysis. The results of an analysis in Method can be used to refine corporate governance policies, prepare counsel for meet and confer sessions, and provide a custodian asset list for a forensic collections team. If a litigation matter or regulatory action occurs, organizations that understand their exposure will have an advantage in preparing for a legal hold, responding to a regulatory agency, or negotiating with opposing counsel.

Method provides a variety of secure authentication capabilities for those individuals administering a hold. With a standard Microsoft infrastructure, Method allows IT teams to secure and back up data with the same strategies they employ for other enterprise systems. Corporations can use Method as an on-premises installation, or hosted on demand by a Method Provider.

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Law Firms

Law firms initiate the legal hold process for their clients, as well as for their own internal matters. These firms are counselors to their clients before and during discovery, and are thus responsible for identifying and preserving large amounts of paper-based and electronically-stored documents. Often, a single attorney must manage multiple legal holds simultaneously.

To manage the legal hold process for multiple clients and internal matters, law firms need a reliable solution to organize holds in a way that can scale to the needs of each particular case and client. kCura’s web-based legal hold management application, Method, was designed to be this solution.

Method’s flexible feature set allows users to customize hold notices, question sets, and e-mail templates to meet the unique needs of each legal hold. These customized workflows can be saved and repeated, allowing users to easily oversee multiple holds concurrently. This also gives firms the ability to transfer the management of the hold to a different individual at any point in the process.

In addition to flexible workflows, defensibility is a key component to the success of a legal hold. If important information is lost or overlooked, both law firms and their clients risk losing time, money, and productivity. Method’s automated ability to deliver question sets, combined with built-in reporting tools, mitigates these risks. Users can generate detailed reports with complete, defensibly-sound audit trails by custodian, in addition to displaying all communications and a real-time scorecard of who has responded, or is in the process of responding, to a hold notice or question set. These reporting tools are also useful for presenting a more proactive approach to the firm’s clients in assessing risk for the purposes of litigation preparedness.

Built on the Relativity e-discovery platform, Method benefits from a highly-granular security architecture, enabling the flexibility to customize the application to meet the needs of the firm. In addition to workflow-based security, Method provides a variety of secure authentication methods for the individuals who administer legal holds. With a standard Microsoft infrastructure, Method allows IT teams to secure and back up data with the same strategies they employ for other enterprise systems. Law firms can use Method as an on-premises installation, or hosted on demand by a Method Provider.

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Service Providers

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.

Method's on-demand model is available exclusively through a Method Provider. It can be delivered as either a managed solution, whereby a provider assists with the management and administration of holds, or as a self-service model in which the firm or corporation performs the administration, but leverages the partner’s software and infrastructure. This provides clients with a quick implementation and no IT overhead.

The kCura team is committed to establishing a positive Method experience for both our partners and their clients through a dedication to customer service.

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