Atlas Compliance Automation for Email Archive Systems
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — November 9, 2009 — Email is included in over 70% of legal holds. Treated as an afterthought only a few years ago, the ability preserve and collect email is now mandated by the amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). Unfortunately many have struggled to meet the new FRCP requirements due to the unprecedented volume of email information present within a modern organization.
Many companies have embraced email archive systems to help with their email retention objectives. Over time many of these archive applications have added capabilities to place emails on hold as well as additional offerings that allow users to efficiently review and cull information that has been preserved. While these capabilities are important elements of any preservation program it is important to remember that the email archive system plays just one role in the e-discovery process. For a complete solution, Legal and IT departments must holistically manage the notification, discovery, interview, collection and review process for custodians and data sources across the entire matter.
ACA Overview
Integrating Atlas with a company's email archive system enables the legal team to reduce the complexity of multiple legal holds and over-lapping custodians and collections while also providing the IT department with an efficient solution for managing litigation holds and collections across numerous assets and employees.
To enable this connection, PSS has developed Atlas Compliance Automation (ACA) connectors that provide preconfigured integrations between the Atlas e-discovery suite and the major email archive systems in the marketplace. Using the ACA connector, attorneys are able to manage email content as they would information from any other source system mapped in Atlas to design and execute legal holds and collections programs. Additionally, the unique features of the ACA allow legal teams to leverage features, such as applying immediate litigation holds to emails within the archive and to create one-time or ongoing hold actions. The ACA connector ensures that no custodians are omitted and no critical archived email information is overlooked during e-discovery.
The ACA connector completely automates the legal holds process from Atlas to the archive system through a Web Services architecture requiring no changes to a client's existing IT environment. Once the preservation plan is entered in Atlas, the ACA connector creates the case in archive system and legal holds are automatically executed.
Benefits of Atlas and the ACA:
Minimize legal and information risk
Atlas allows Legal teams to tightly define custodian lists and affected archive systems, initiate immediate legal holds on relevant information, and create structured collection plans to ease the gaps and overlapping spreadsheets typically found in most discovery efforts. Legal is able to apply in-place litigation holds into the email archival systems at the moment a matter is initiated, saving potential information that might otherwise have been unprotected. Using the ACA connector to link Atlas with an email archive solution automates the e-discovery process and helps ensure that all changes made to custodian lists or preservation plans are automatically transferred and modify the result set in the archive system.
Reduce data management and IT costs
By leveraging hold-in-place capabilities managed through Atlas, companies can apply appropriate retention schedules to their email assets managed in the archive system. Atlas allows IT to clearly understand all email that falls within the scope of any active matters therefore enabling the email administrator to execute appropriate retention programs against the emails that are not on hold. Estimates suggest that companies can cut their data storage by 25% by simply following defensible data deletion 2. The ACA connector provides IT with this insight to drive substantial savings.
Reduce discovery and legal costs
Using Atlas to establish globally defined preservation plans, custodian lists, and interviews means that only highly relevant information is placed on legal hold. Leveraging the ACA connectors, attorneys are able to conduct early case assessment to understand the cost and exposure implications of each matter so that legal can make more informed decisions on case strategy. Additionally, using Atlas helps ensure that only relevant information is passed along to the collect and review process saving substantial time and costs in the process.
Simplify compliance
Atlas enables legal users to easily define the scope of a matter, identify relevant custodians, send hold notices and transfer preservation plans automatically to the email archive system. Further, any changes to the scope plan - typically additional or deletion of custodians - are automatically published to the archive system. Legal and IT departments are able to systematically manage and monitor all the litigation holds, collection requests and legal obligations in a single, cohesive system.
Partnering with Atlas
The established standard for legal information governance, PSS Atlas has been selected by Global 2000 industry leaders across Financial Services, Pharmaceuticals, and Petrochemicals among other industries. The Atlas Suite is the only end-to-end legal information governance solution for corporate legal, IT, records and business users designed and built on a single, cohesive governance platform. The Atlas Suite provides intelligent legal holds, collection and compliance, value-based retention, and discovery and data management cost control.
