Altien Ltd

For in-house legal departments, operating a standalone document management system has a number of drawbacks. It acts as a barrier to information sharing with internal clients and impedes the coordination of legal and compliance-related business processes across the enterprise. It also means higher costs in dedicated hardware, software and ongoing IT support.

But perhaps most significantly, many legal departments are now battling to control the spiraling costs and risks related to eDiscovery. To achieve this they must establish organization-wide policies for information governance, and work with IT to implement similarly organization-wide systems to enforce these policies.

Reducing the proliferation of disparate systems is key to achieving this goal. Unless in-house counsel lead the way in moving from a siloed, departmental mentality towards common, standards-based solutions, they risk undermining efforts to persuade other business units to do the same.

Altien has created a compelling alternative to the standalone legal document management systems of the past. Altien Legal Document Manager (LDM) is an advanced, matter-centric document & business process management solution for the IBM Enterprise Content Management platform.

Although the duty to preserve evidence is not new, the 2006 amendments to the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure have created significant new challenges for organizations because the rules now cover the discovery and preservation of electronically stored information “ESI” as well as paper documents.

An organization must now implement a legal hold process – to prevent the destruction of information that may be relevant to the case – as soon as it may “reasonably anticipate” litigation. This means that organizations need to be able to implement a legal hold at very short notice.

The risks of failing to successfully manage the legal hold process are considerable. Evidence that might support the organization’s legal position might simply be lost. More worrying, given the complexity of implementing a wide ranging hold in a large organization, is the risk of sanctions for spoliation including substantial fines, adverse inference instructions and even summary judgment.

In order to comply with the duty to preserve evidence, organizations must be prepared. They need a clear strategy and detailed procedures that will be followed in each case. The sheer volume of ESI and the proliferation and complexity of systems means ESI may still be lost inadvertently. An organization’s best defense is to be able to demonstrate that it has acted in good faith and followed a consistent and rigorous legal hold process.

Altien Legal Hold Process Manager (LHPM) enables corporate legal departments to establish and manage an efficient, consistent and defensible legal hold process, using the IBM ECM platform.