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Atlas Suite

"The Atlas Suite, which is designed to enable corporations to implement and automate legally defensible retention and legal holds operations, has achieved significant customer uptake and enjoys real customer loyalty."

— Vivian Tero, Senior Research Analyst for Compliance Infrastructure, IDC

PSS Systems started the legal holds and retention management software revolution in early 2004 when it anticipated the collision between the prevailing "save everything" practice and the inevitability of routine electronic discovery. It envisioned both the tactical crises that would occur and the strategic needs that would unfold — Atlas LCC helps litigation departments respond to the urgent challenges of much broader preservation obligations and Atlas ERM helps companies restore rational information retention processes to ultimately reduce the volume of information and break the crisis cycle. Both modules incorporate the Atlas platform, which provides a reference map of the corporation, its employees (past and present) and its diverse systems and data stores.

Today, Atlas manages legal holds, collections, and enterprise retention to reduce cost, burden, and risk for the world’s leading corporations.

"Atlas LCC is a comprehensive workflow solution that helps companies effectively and efficiently manage legal hold and collection processes. Atlas ERM enables companies to revitalize their retention practices across disparate data sources in concert with meeting legal hold obligations. It’s a smart solution for addressing legal obligations, reducing risk and reducing cost."

— Cathy Muir, former Senior Corporate Counsel, Sprint

The Atlas software reduces both cost and risk. Atlas ERM and Atlas LCC together enable companies to determine what information they need to retain in response to both laws and lawsuits — and therefore what information they don't need to retain. When companies can't determine what to retain, they are often forced to retain everything — an increasing cost and frustration factor in the executive suite, litigation group, and IT department alike today.

And while many companies respond to this crisis by looking for ways to reduce discovery and review costs, this cost is merely a symptom of the disease and not the disease itself! With information volume increasing at 50% a year, equivalent discovery cost reductions simply aren’t possible — and may even divert attention from addressing the underlying disease of poor information policy and procedures.

Only the Atlas software suite is designed to help companies effectively and efficiently determine what information must be retained for business or regulatory purposes, what must be preserved and collected for litigation, and to routinely dispose of unneeded data. The suite is comprised of modules for the corporate stakeholders involved in defining, managing and enforcing legal obligations over information:

Atlas LCC helps for corporate legal departments more efficiently and effectively manage legal holds and evidence collection with precision and reliability to reduce burden, risk and legacy data build up.

Atlas ERM helps address the root cause of excessive discovery costs — too much information accumulating across the enterprise and no clear rule on what and when to dispose. Atlas ERM enables retention management leaders to develop and sustain information retention programs across business units, applications and repositories, and country boundaries. Atlas LCC and Atlas ERM work seamlessly together so companies can confidently dispose of information without risk of spoliation.

Policy Portals makes it easy for individual employees and IT staff to look up their own legal holds and retention schedules so they can readily determine how to manage their information in compliance with company and legal mandates.

Atlas Reference Map is the enabling platform for the suite and is included with both Atlas ERM and Atlas LCC. It captures and presents the organization structure, employees, and systems in the enterprise in context for legal and governance stakeholders. It reflects both current and historical employees and systems and it accurately manages the inter-relationships and dependencies between divisions, people, systems, classes of information, legal holds, retention rules, and privacy requirements.

Policy Enforcement Services automates legal holds, information collection and retention periods on data in various systems such as Documentum, fileshares, Sharepoint, and business applications so that companies can very efficiently enforce their policies and legal obligations.

Putting the Pieces Together

Efficient, effective legal holds and collections process that ensures all stakeholders in preservation have the facts they need
Retention program that spans disparate business units, data sources and repositories, and data types to enable routine disposal
Map of data sources and responsible stewards for closed loop communications on holds and retention schedules

Without these elements in place — and without accuracy and reliability — companies will have higher legal and operating costs, greater risk of failure and associated sanctions, and increased litigation settlement rates. Managing legal hold, retention and data source activities manually with spreadsheets and administrative staff is a huge burden and undeniably error prone; it simply doesn't provide litigation executives with the controls they need to mitigate their risks and it doesn’t enable them to normalize data retention processes.

Atlas is the Answer

The Atlas suite from PSS Systems is the world’s leading legal hold and retention management software. With over 100,000 legal holds, collections, and 80,000 retention schedules under management in Fortune 500 companies, it has helped leaders in virtually every industry reduce risk and cost.

PSS Systems pioneered the legal holds and collections software category in late 2004 when it installed its first version of Atlas at an investment bank. After four years in production use in the world’s leading corporations managing over one hundred thousand holds, over a million custodians and data sources in preservation and collection, and eighty thousand retention schedules around the globe, Atlas is the "gold standard" - it’s powerful, trusted, and mature.

"PSS has the only truly end-to-end retention and legal holds solution on the market. I’ve had the pleasure to work with them for two years — Atlas is well thought out, comprehensive software that adds real value. The PSS team provides an outstanding customer experience." —Harry Pugh, Managing Director, Operations & Technology Policy Coordinator, Citigroup

Customer Successes with Atlas LCC
Today, tens of thousands of Atlas users are managing over 100,000 legal holds and collections involving more than 1 million custodians and data sources or assets.
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