LexisNexis CounselLink Legal Hold Helps Corporate Legal Departments Execute and Manage Compliance with Legal Holds, Reducing Risk of Fines, Sanctions and Spoliation Charges

April 13, 2011 — NEW YORK – LexisNexis (www.lexisnexis.com), a leading global provider of content-enabled workflow solutions, today launched LexisNexis® CounselLink® Legal Hold, a new product that gives corporate legal departments a stronger, more systematic set of tools to fulfill court-ordered responsibilities with respect to the execution of legal holds. U.S. courts have recently intensified both their scrutiny of legal hold procedures as well as the severity of penalties – including fines and perhaps even spoliation charges – they impose against companies that fail to comply with this fundamental duty to preserve information in the discovery phase of a legal matter.

"LexisNexis® CounselLink® Legal Hold is designed to help remove the fear and the confusion surrounding the entire legal hold process," said Mike Lipps, vice president and managing director, Legal Business Software Solutions for LexisNexis. "CounselLink Legal Hold helps reduce financial risk and provides corporate legal departments with comprehensive and easy to use tools they need to manage all related communication, notifications, audit reports and other forms of electronic verification required by the courts."

When a company is being sued or when there is a reasonable chance the company will be sued, it must issue a legal hold to preserve all information and documents in its possession that may be relevant to the case. The legal department must also send regular reminders to custodians (individuals in possession of potentially relevant documents) and notify custodians when they are released from the hold. CounselLink Legal Hold enables and tracks the email notifications and acknowledgements — including updates to the initial notification — providing an auditable trail of who was notified, when they were notified, when they acknowledged the notice, and when they were notified that they were released from the hold.

Key Benefits:

  • Improves speed and efficiency in creating and issuing written holds to all involved parties in anticipation of pending litigation
  • Integrates with corporate HR systems to track when custodians join or leave the company so that IT departments can be proactively notified in order to preserve information stored on equipment used by former employees
  • Issues and tracks automatic reminder notices to custodians that they still have a duty to preserve
  • Makes all legal hold information available for reporting so that audit reports, statistics and trends can be presented for verification that proper hold notice processes were followed

 

Current CounselLink customers can subscribe to the Legal Hold module for an additional fee. The feature will appear as a new tab at the top of the page alongside the Matter and Invoice tabs, and display any related legal holds. CounselLink Legal Hold can also be ordered as a standalone product or as an integrated solution with other CounselLink modules for matter management and e-billing.

For more information about CounselLink Legal Hold, visit www.lexisnexis.com/lh.

About LexisNexis

LexisNexis® (www.lexisnexis.com) is a leading global provider of content-enabled workflow solutions designed specifically for professionals in the legal, risk management, corporate, government, law enforcement, accounting, and academic markets. LexisNexis originally pioneered online information with its Lexis® and Nexis® services. A member of Reed Elsevier [NYSE: ENL; NYSE: RUK] (www.reedelsevier.com), LexisNexis serves customers in more than 100 countries with 15,000 employees worldwide.