Atlas Discovery for Legal

Atlas Enterprise Discovery Management > Atlas Discovery for Legal | Atlas Discovery for IT | Atlas Discovery for Employees

Atlas Discovery for Legal software automates the holds, collection and audit processes across Legal, IT, RIM and lines of business. Discovery for Legal allows you to easily segment and manage messages for large custodian lists, scope more efficiently and precisely, conduct consistent and far-reaching custodian online interviews to ensure the scope of holds and collections is sufficient but not over-broad, and eliminate manual follow up with systematic compilation, reminders, and action items based on custodian responses to hold notices and interviews. Atlas one-click navigation makes it easy to immediately access these details without compromising overall process rigor or integrity.

Right from their browsers, attorneys can preserve data in place and collect it directly from email archives, file shares, enterprise content systems, and custodians. Atlas monitors status and automatically completes the chain of custody log, preserving metadata and the audit trail so they are available to inside and outside counsel. Use Atlas Discovery for Legal for automatic custodian reconciliation and to detect and respond immediately to employee transitions, collection delays, and release eligibility.

Atlas Discovery for Legal enables your organization to 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 Discovery Cost Forecasting, Atlas helps inside and outside counsel 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 Discovery for Legal Capabilities

Efficiently Scopes and Manages Custodians and Data Sources

  • Easily manage very large custodian pools
  • Scope and identify custodians by their responsibilities for records, IT systems or involvement in the issue in dispute
  • Copy custodian lists from existing matters to accelerate and improve hold scoping
  • Scope custodians individually, by current or historical department affiliation, by function or role, prior matter involvement, project code, or other attributes
  • View an organization to quickly see its employees and data sources and its departmental structure
  • Track and scope terminated employee assets
  • Filter employees by status, title, responsibility or responsiveness for more targeted communications
  • Add, remove, and segment custodians over time
  • Scope based on country boundaries
  • Appropriate legal staff get alerted automatically whenever custodians in their holds transfer or terminate so data can be sequestered
  • Define data sources involved in matters and track them as you would custodians; 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
  • Define and re-use standard preservation protocols for data sources based on their unique data management methods and ability to preserve in place (when used in coordination with Atlas Discovery for IT)

Streamlines and Automates 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
  • Create tables, bullet lists, include images, and use advanced formatting to increase the impact and effectiveness of notices
  • Copy the hold and its recipients and issue multiple versions of notices as facts change over the matter lifecycle
  • Include attachments to notices
  • Systematically send reminders, track confirmations, escalate non-confirmations, and alert legal staff to exceptions
  • Enable confirmation through browser, email or recorded by a legal user
  • Record employee verbal and paper confirmations for a complete audit trail
  • Manage multiple notices over long matter lifecycles with visibility across legal staff
  • Courtesy copy the notice to management and legal staff
  • Route notices for approval prior to publication; capture the approval history automatically
  • Define criteria for holding records and data in place in repositories and archives, and publish holds directly to systems (when used in coordination with Atlas Discovery for IT and Atlas Compliance Automation )
  • Efficiently define and communicate instructions to IT to place holds on specific custodians' data within a data source and require confirmation tracking per custodian and/or data source (when used in coordination with Atlas Discovery for IT)
  • 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
  • Define both questions and answers with checkboxes, text fields, drop down lists, and conditional questions
  • Allow custodians to save their responses and complete them in multiple sessions
  • View saved drafts and record responses on the custodian's behalf in interactive interviews

Automates Actions and Improves Follow Up on Interview Results

  • Automatically collate recipient responses by group, question, answer, and follow up required
  • View responses to a single question/answer combination across all custodians or view responses to all questions for one or more custodians
  • 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 Discovery for IT)
  • Provide outside counsel with employee responses to facilitate in-person interviews

Plans and Coordinates Data Collections

  • Collect to preserve when necessary and easily adjust the collection as document requests are received
  • Define and re-use standard collection protocols for data sources for consistency and completeness (when used in coordination with Atlas Discovery for IT)
  • Determine collection scope and assign collections to discovery specialists with complete instructions, full custodian and data source information, shared status tracking, data ingestion, and automatic audit trail (when used in coordination with Atlas Discovery for IT)
  • Issue multiple collection instructions to specialists, RIM, and even 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
  • Enable collections appropriate for diverse country laws including voluntary collections in European Union and specialist collections in the United States (even in the same matter)
  • Collect directly from custodians with metadata and chain of custody record
  • Audit or sample the collection by custodian, data source, and content for the matter at any time and augment it as needed
  • Automatically collect from data sources (when used in coordination with Atlas Compliance Automation)
  • Eliminate manual logging of files collected by custodian, their source, hash, and chain of custody with automated record keeping

Manages Collected Data Efficiently

  • Collected data is indexed and searchable as it is ingested, including email messages, files, and attachments
  • Search by custodian and content to quickly assess collection completeness, evidence or matter standing
  • Avoid re-collecting data already in Legal's possession with easy custodian and data source look-ups and full collection history
  • Export data for review in its native form for specific or all custodians with an automatic audit trail; track when and where collected information was distributed and monitor for return or disposition
  • Disposition the collection when the matter is finally resolved; determine which review and law firms have data to be dispositioned and release the hold

Easy to Use with Natural Process Management

  • Quickly navigate to recent work with "personal breadcrumbs" and fast one-click navigation
  • 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
  • Look up facts by organization, matter, custodian, data source or other element with automatic cross referencing to get a 360 degree view
  • View personalized dashboards with work in progress, items for review, key matter status, and favorite reports

Easily Controls, Monitors, and Manages the Discovery Process

  • Exceptions to holds, collection requests, and interviews are automatically detected, and legal staff is alerted via email and on their dashboards
  • Status and due date tracking ensures timely completion of discovery activity and enables cycle time tracking
  • Departing and transferring employees are automatically detected and legal can look up holds by employee
  • Manage matter category permissions with enhanced security controls and matter-specific access control
  • Action items and alerts are automatically assigned and easy to manage
  • 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
  • Use dozens of built-in reports, save them to PDF or Excel, or write your own web-based reports
  • Look up current legal holds and collections for any employee or system
  • Define discovery delegate or steward for data sources
  • Look up terminated employees to determine active holds and collections

Manages the Matter Closure, Release, and Disposition Processes

  • Release one or more custodians over the matter course
  • Release holds on data sources for routine disposal
  • Close out matters including disposition of collected data to avoid legacy data build up
  • Determine where collected data has been provided to service providers or outside counsel and ensure its destruction
  • Easily cross reference custodians in a closing matter to determine other matters with active holds and collections; reference their open matters in release notices or selectively release custodians
  • Secure, authorized disposition workflow prevents errors
  • Track all holds, all custodians, and all data sources for a definitive view of legal obligations and to enable routine, defensible disposal of data not on hold

Manages Asset Inventory

  • Define all classes of data sources and manage as a portfolio; type and clone to populate the catalog
  • Use flexible data source definitions to define and manage assets by data type, system type and administration, active status, DR policy, security, and discovery attributes
  • Centrally manage data service providers and vendors and associate one or more assets and organizations with the provider
  • Link assets to one or more organizations
  • Manage predecessor/successor relationships
  • Manage staff assignments to data sources
  • Ability to set up data sources (including email, desktop, file shares, applications) and corresponding collection templates for collection workflow

Enables Data Governance

  • Filter and find assets by location, data type, vendor, system type, responsibility, organizations served, and stewards
  • Track system retirement and transitions
  • Capture the history of a system, including its active lifecycle, business unit relationships, data format, retention and DR practice, and successor systems