Office 365 Litigation Hold can only support organizations with rudimentary legal retention requirements. Businesses of all sizes experience litigation at some point, but companies at the company level are more likely to face litigation because of the number of people they employ and struggle with the legal detention process. For this reason, certain challenges may arise during the process, such as changes in employee status, non-cooperative custodians, or multiple competing legal obligations. Your business needs to prepare for each of these opportunities by creating a truly proactive Office 365 process for technology-based legal retention. If you have configured a search to be configured to search for pending locations, a change is made, such as: by adding or removing a search location, the search configuration is automatically updated with those changes. However, it is important to know that you will need to run the search again once the change is made to update the search results. To enable litigation retention in Microsoft 365, follow these steps: The electronic survey (eDiscovery) identifies and locates electronically stored information for use in court proceedings. To obtain this information, organizations can introduce a legal obstacle. An eDiscovery retention is a notice that directs employees and systems to retain certain electronic data because there is a reasonable expectation that it may be necessary for litigation or investigation. Here, O365`s Legal Holds and eDiscovery tools can pose challenges for members of the legal team: You can also run the following command to verify that the mailbox has been placed on litigation hold: In addition to streamlining case suspension in Office 365, Mimecast helps you prepare for litigation on other platforms and serves as a FINRA and HIPAA-compliant email service. Litigation in Office 365 is an essential part of an organization`s reasonable retention efforts.
While Office 365 provides useful tools to speed up this process, internal teams still need to combine their Office 365 process assurance plan with more robust, legally conscious tools to prove the defensability of their dispute retention processes. When a mailbox, SharePoint site, or OneDrive account is removed from a hold, a «deferred lock» is configured. There is a 30-day period to ensure that the data is not permanently deleted from the location of the content. During these 30 days, IT administrators and legal departments have the option to search for and/or restore content to be deleted. Deferred locking works a little differently for each Office 365 workload, so we`ll explain in more detail below. 8. The «Litigation hold: Disabled» should now be «Litigation hold: Enabled». Please press «Save». Litigation hold can also be enabled in Microsoft 365 by using PowerShell with the mailbox set $true -LitigationHoldEnabled and associated cmdlets.
Now that you understand the options and how they work, learn how to create a legal eDiscovery hold in Microsoft 365. It`s worth noting that there is a difference between an Office 365 content search and an eDiscovery queue. It`s also important to note that in almost every situation, this isn`t something a normal end user would do. This would be an IT administrator or, depending on how permissions were configured within the organization, a member of a legal team. Mailboxes: The deferred lock is placed on the mailbox the next time the Managed Folder Wizard processes the mailbox and determines that a lock has been removed. When Deferred Locking is configured, the mailbox will always be in the hold area for an unlimited retention period as if the mailbox were pending for litigation. When a mailbox is placed in the Litigation Hold pane, items in the Cleanup subfolder are retained for the retention period specified in the Litigation Hold. The retention period is calculated from the original date an item was received or created and sets how long items are kept in the Cleanups subfolder. When the retention period for an item in the Delete subfolder expires, the item is marked for permanent deletion and deleted from Exchange the next time the mailbox is processed by multi-factor authentication. If a mailbox is locked indefinitely, items are never deleted from the Cleanup subfolder. The previous command to set an archive for all mailboxes uses a recipient filter that returns all user mailboxes. You can use other recipient properties to return a list of specific mailboxes, which you can then pass to the Set-Mailbox cmdlet to place a dispute hold procedure on those mailboxes.
On the Suspension for Litigation fly page, click Save Changes to create the hold. Of course, as a Microsoft Office 365-based company, end users can`t view, change, or remove legal restrictions on their data. This is a purely IT operation or possibly a legal team operation, depending on your organizational structure, which is carried out from time to time. Litigation hold is not an alternative to a backup because it only applies to items that are in an end user`s inbox and must also be enabled before deleting items for the restore to succeed. Litigation retention is useful for eDiscovery purposes and is an essential aspect of compliance maintenance, but is not intended as a complete solution to a company`s record-keeping practices. Click View Details to check when and by whom the mailbox was placed in the Litigation Hold box. You can also view or change the values in the optional Test duration (days), Rating, and URL fields. So why not automate the process? If you rely on manual processes to file a lawsuit in Office 365, there`s room for human error and significantly slows down the legal retention process. By using a third-party archiving solution to create a record of all email correspondence and automate legal retention, you can speed up the retention process, ensure it`s repeatable, and provide a court with detailed documentation of your efforts. By choosing the right solution, you can ensure that your business is better prepared to deal with any legal challenges you may face. Creating and tracking alerts for your customers is also important.
Organizations with Advanced eDiscovery enabled can access their eDiscovery case list in the O365 Compliance Center and use the Communication Creation Assistant to design and automate initial notifications, follow-up notifications, resend notifications, and escalations. You can also create portals for custodian banks to track their compliance with outstanding issues. Most email logging platforms offer a high level of granularity, which is great for segmenting communications by department, sender/recipient, or message content, but can be confusing for admins when it comes to implementing a legal ban on Office 365. Also, when creating duplicates, email journaling excludes important information such as calendar and contact information that can cause problems when requesting eDiscovery. This can be facilitated by a tool that allows you to track who is in which waiting area, and you can even set up alerts that are noticed, for example, when a user is removed from an active suspension. The challenge for organizations is to streamline litigation management for Office 365 to reduce costs and minimize the workload for legal and IT teams. For many organizations, Office 365 Native Legal Hold may not provide the flexibility, centralized control, and time-saving features needed to speed up eDiscovery and make it easier to resolve cases in Office 365. This is where Mimecast can help. Combining Office 365 Legal Holds with a discovery and legal retention platform like Logikcull can simplify your processes through automation and make O365 eDiscovery much more transparent and cost-effective. — To put an entire inbox on hold, an administrator uses the LitigationHoldEnabled property of a mailbox to set a dispute lock.
Because the entire contents of a mailbox are retained, only one disputed amount can be placed in an inbox at a time. One drawback of Microsoft`s system is that the lock does not take effect immediately. Instead, it has a latency of up to 24 hours. Legal withholding – also known as a litigation stay or, in some cases, a seizure order – refers to the process by which a company informs its employees (or, in legal jargon, custodians) not to delete electronically stored information (ESI) or to reject paper records relevant to ongoing or future litigation. Launching an Office 365 retention process varies from company to company, as each organization is responsible for developing its own legal retention process. That said, the standard process as established by the company`s legal team should look like this: O365 Legal Hold Tools can make it easier to find and secure evidence. However, O365 is designed for the average business user and IT – not for lawyers.