Legal Hold Technology: Saving Time and Reducing Risk

Lauren Burnside of Mitratech reports that legal holds remain a high-stakes responsibility for corporate legal departments. Legal hold technology directly addresses this challenge by automating notifications, tracking custodian acknowledgments, preserving electronic data, and maintaining verifiable audit trails.

With data scattered across email, collaboration platforms, human resource systems, and cloud storage, manual preservation is prone to errors and time-consuming. The consequences of inadequate preservation practices are serious: Courts expect prompt, documented action when litigation is anticipated. A single missed custodian or overlooked file can expose organizations to sanctions, fines, or reputational damage. Legal hold technology minimizes these risks by documenting the entire preservation process. 

Beyond risk reduction, legal hold technology reduces the heavy administrative burden on legal teams. Instead of chasing acknowledgments or sending repeated reminders, legal teams can be confident that custodians have received and responded to notices. Centralized dashboards provide real-time visibility across multiple cases, enabling legal departments to maintain complete control over active, paused, or released holds. 

Furthermore, legal hold technology streamlines the legal hold process by connecting directly with enterprise systems, strengthening chain-of-custody records, and ensuring comprehensive preservation. By fostering collaboration among legal, IT, HR, and compliance teams, legal hold platforms establish a shared, defensible process. This alignment reduces miscommunication, accelerates response times, and prepares organizations for audits, investigations, regulatory reviews, and litigation.

For legal ops professionals, the question is no longer whether to adopt legal hold technology but how to select a solution that balances ease of use, scalability, and defensibility. As data volumes grow and court expectations intensify, organizations that modernize their legal hold processes will be best positioned to manage litigation with confidence.