Solutions
Atlas LCC for Litigation Holds & Evidence Collection Management
PSS Systems invented litigation communications and collections software and continues to set the solution standard today. Over 100,000 legal holds and collections are managed in Atlas LCC tracking half a million custodians and millions of data sources and assets — these benchmarks for legal holds, custodians, and collections under Atlas management demonstrate the reliability and prevalence of Atlas, and the scale and criticality of legal hold software to the Fortune 500.
Atlas LCC manages the legal hold and collection process for corporate litigation departments and the discovery delegates in IT and records departments; it enables continuous discovery readiness and goes well beyond compliance with the amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to provide both offensive and defensive strength.
“Over the last year, our customers have experienced a significant increase in the number of holds and the number of custodians identified in those holds combined with an urgency to incorporate data sources into their preservation practices. In any large or global company, this new obligation has a substantial time, cost and risk impact – as a result, many litigation executives are under pressure to improve predictability and precision.
Atlas 3.1 automates even more of these activities, provides more sophisticated tools for monitoring custodians and data sources in multiple matters to reduce the disruption of IT operations, and provides far greater visibility and predictability to executives on past and future costs and risks.”
— Deidre Paknad, President and CEO of PSS Systems and the acknowledged inventor of litigation communication and collection software
With Atlas LCC, you can automate and manage the process from end to end — reducing the burden, risk and cost. Manage hundreds of matters and custodians or tens of thousands with the same ease, reliability, traceability, and confidence.
Predictability and Accountability
Atlas LCC offers tremendous intelligence and information about the litigation and discovery workload. With clear accountability for every hold, every custodian, every data source and collection, legal teams can provide IT and the business with clear guidance on what to preserve and what to disposition. Atlas provides the fact patterns and intelligence to improve case strategy, balance staffing, charge back to business units more effectively, predict impacts and costs of litigation by matter type and business unit, and to tune data management practices to reduce costs and risks.
Scoping People & Systems with Custody of Information
Atlas LCC helps legal, tax and compliance teams quickly and accurately identify the individual custodians, systems, IT staff, and records coordinators in the scope of a matter and each related document request. The Atlas platform provides a powerful and elegant way to browse the organization structure, the employee hierarchy and the data sources by business unit to scope. Atlas LCC captures and tracks the master custodian and systems list over the course of the matter and readily displays the discovery and hold activities for each person and system involved in every matter. Scoping matters is fast and dynamic and Atlas LCC makes it very easy to reference historical organization and matter information in subsequent matters — so you can readily use what you already know to make better case decisions.
Communicating Holds
Communicating the preservation obligation to individual custodians, IT system stewards, and records coordinators is necessary — but ensuring that they receive and understand the communication and that they have continuing awareness of it are also essential. Targeting your communications and following through are very easy in Atlas LCC. The trend toward discovery on discovery mandates an audit trail of who was notified when and the Zubulake V standard of frequent reminders has become black letter law. Atlas LCC eliminates the tedious aspects of notice transmissions and record keeping while alerting you automatically to exceptions and issues. It offers continuous transparency of hold duties to IT and individual custodians. An employee self-service portal ensures that employees always know their duties and that release notices can be confidently sent.
Enforce Holds on Unstructured Data and Hold in Place
Now Atlas LCC allows attorneys and paralegals to scope holds by custodian, data sources, date range and keywords and automatically enforce that hold on data in content management systems and file shares. With Atlas Policy Enforcement Services, you can reduce the amount of data collected while improving hold integrity — all without sacrificing the record keeping and related process steps in the litigation department's discovery workflow.
Conduct Virtual and Physical Interviews
Interviewing custodians is an important part of determining whether the appropriate data sources have been identified, what kind of information may need to be collected from where, and who may be involved. In Atlas LCC, you can conduct physical interviews or virtual interviews to understand the case, data and custodian dynamics. Without assurance that all answers will be addressed, written interviews just add risk to the process so Atlas LCC removes all of the burden and risk associated with compiling and addressing custodian responses. Get the facts faster and spend less time determining which facts need follow up.
Manage Collections and Discovery Workflow
Atlas LCC manages collection workflows for the paralegals, attorneys, and discovery delegates from start to finish. It replaces the email and phone communications of the legal team, the innumerable email requests for collections issued between legal and IT, and the gaps that result from these methods of management. With Atlas LCC, instructions are clear, due dates tracked, progress automatically captured, and automatic file logging by custodian and collection and chain of custody increase visibility and reduce costs across legal and IT. Atlas LCC also enables legal, tax and compliance teams to collect directly from individual custodians via the web. Custodians upload their documents in a simple web page.
Automated Collections
Use Atlas LCC to collect data from Documentum, Sharepoint, file shares and other unstructured data sources directly. With our connectors to popular collection tools and ECM systems, attorneys and paralegals can collect easily and directly from the convenient Atlas LCC desktop without burdening IT or manually conducting the collection. As with all collected evidence managed in Atlas, the content is automatically indexed, inventoried, and hashed for full chain of custody and evidentiary integrity — and to fully automate the tedious process of documenting the collection activity.
Predict and Assess Discovery Costs
Atlas LCC automatically captures matter, scope, custodian, data and collection volume information and provides built-in case cost assessment tools so you can evaluate the impact of review and cull rates on a particular case. Cost forecasting reports and management tools enable the litigation department to understand the costs of discovery in future quarters and fiscal periods. Detailed reporting by matter type, cost element, stage of litigation, and other factors are automatic in Atlas LCC.
Synchronize Data Sources and Sustain an Accurate Inventory
Atlas gets its name from the built-in “map” of the data sources, organization and employees. Atlas monitors for departing employees involved in any holds and alerts the legal team automatically. Monitoring and alerting ensure that the legal team has an effective early warning system and can focus on the things that matter most. Manage data sources by type, location, content, cost of restoration, staff assignments and much more.
Flexible Evidence Inventory Management
Atlas LCC automatically inventories any and all data collected, regardless of source or method of collection. As increasing volumes of information are collected, it is imperative that the legal department know what is in its own custody. Manually cataloging millions of files is impossible, so Atlas LCC automatically inventories collections and tracks by matter, request, custodian and source. Use our built-in Oracle evidence repository or an existing content repository with Atlas LCC.
Straight Thru to Review
Use Atlas LCC seamlessly with in-house or external review applications such as Attenex or Lexis products without duplicating the data — so you reduce handling, processing, and data management costs significantly. Integrated dashboards and reports allow you to see the status of a document or matter from start to finish.
Process IQ ™
Atlas LCC is a business tool for the litigation department. As such, it enables the team to see and understand patterns across matters and over time — from cost trends, to data volume trends from particular data sources or custodians, to turn around time on IT collections, to patterns within certain jurisdictions or matter types. Knowledge is power, ignorance is expensive!
Atlas LCC is the best investment you can make to reduce cost, risk, and burden in your preservation process.
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