Atlas eDiscovery Process Management

Automate legal holds, collection and audit processes

Overview

IBM Atlas eDiscovery Process Management enables attorneys, paralegals and discovery directors to manage a rigorous, defensible legal holds workflow.

With Atlas eDiscovery Process Management, legal can:

Easily segment and manage messages for large custodian lists
Scope more efficiently and precisely
Conduct consistent and far-reaching online custodian interviews
Eliminate manual follow up with systematic compilation, reminders, and action items based on custodian responses to hold notices and interviews.
Preserve data in place and collect directly from email archives, file shares, enterprise content systems, and custodians using a browser-based interface.
Automatically monitor collection status and complete the chain of custody log, preserving metadata and the audit trail so they are available to inside and outside counsel
Detect and respond immediately to employee transitions, collection delays, and release eligibility

Atlas eDiscovery Process Management helps your organization leverage outside counsel more efficiently by pre-interviewing custodians electronically, reducing the scope of data collected and reviewed with tight scoping, and ensuring a reliable, defensible process record. When used with Atlas eDiscovery Cost Forecasting and Management, inside and outside counsel can prepare quickly and effectively for discovery conferences, to jointly establish budget expectations and negotiate the scope of preservation and discovery from a shared fact base.

Atlas eDiscovery Process Management Features and Benefits:

Benefit	Features and Capabilities
Efficiently scope and manage custodians and data sources	Scope and identify custodians by numerous attributes, including their responsibilities for records or IT systems, their involvement in the issue in dispute, by current or historical department affiliation, function, role, prior matter involvement, project code, country, status, title, responsibility or responsiveness Track and scope terminated employee assets, and automatically alert the appropriate legal staff whenever custodians in their holds transfer or terminate Define and track data sources involved in matters; add and remove them as matter facts change. Automatically incorporate data source stewards in hold communications and issue collection instructions to appropriate data liaisons View the master list of data sources for a matter and look up any data source to see all its current holds and pending collections
Streamline and automate hold publication	Segment notices by recipient role or knowledge. Customize notice content and sub-segment custodian population based on their responses and new developments in the matter Establish any number of notice templates with pre-defined variable text that automatically completes the notice and updates as information changes in future reminders Systematically send reminders, track confirmations, escalate non-confirmations, and alert legal staff to exceptions Manage multiple notices over long matter lifecycles with visibility across legal staff Release holds on one or more custodians with comments and systematic release notification; automatically direct custodians to their remaining holds in release notices
Author and conduct effective virtual interviews	Combine initial hold notice with custodian questionnaire incorporating hold compliance tracking Establish intervals for re-issuing questionnaires, track responses, and set escalations for non-responses Author a library of standard questionnaires and add questions as needed
Automate actions and improve follow-up on interview results	Automatically collate recipient responses by group, question, answer, and follow up required Set automatic alerts and action items for specific answers Add comments and notes to each custodian's response for a more complete record and easy follow through on facts gathered. Easily present custodian responses and legal annotations to data collectors without manually creating tedious custodian-specific collection instructions (when used in coordination with Atlas IT eDiscovery Process Management )
Plan and coordinate data collections	Collect to preserve when necessary and easily adjust the collection as document requests are received Issue multiple collection instructions to specialists, RIM, and custodians, and aggregate all collections with automatic record keeping; issue and view sequential collections by their time phase and easily compare what was collected iteratively Use in coordination with Atlas IT eDiscovery Process Management to define and re-use standard collection protocols for data sources, determine collection scope and assign collections to discovery specialists Use in coordination with Atlas eDiscovery Policy Federation Framework and SDK to automatically collect from data sources
Use with natural process management	Personalize your dashboard and alert preferences Create and manage all actions, timelines, and project activity related to a matter for a single source of truth Follow the natural sequence of events and iteration over typical matter lifecycle Define the legal team for a matter and share alerts and action plans automatically
Control, monitor, and manage the discovery process	Automatically detect exceptions to holds, collection requests, and interviews, and alert legal staff via email and on their dashboards Manage matter category permissions with enhanced security controls and matter-specific access control Easily define, track, and monitor all preservation and discovery activities in a single system of record for higher integrity and less manual record keeping Preserve data in place with a full audit trail Publish comprehensive, convenient reports for inside and outside counsel that show the entire preservation and discovery record over the matter life