Building upon its ongoing partnership with FTI’s experts, the client engaged the team to refresh its legal hold process and serve as its e-discovery operations team. With 80 multinational open matters spanning litigation, compliance cases, data subject access requests (DSARs) under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and regulatory audits in EMEA and APAC, the client faces a range of complex, high-stakes e-discovery challenges.

Situation

Prior to FTI’s involvement, the client was not following a standardized approach to legal holds. Matters were not always accurately scoped, and holds were not consistently released once matters had concluded. As a global financial services institution, the client is continually managing a weighty e-discovery portfolio across litigation, regulatory investigations and data privacy inquiries.

The client had also relied upon an e-discovery hosting and review provider that did not measure up to FTI’s standards for advanced analytics capabilities and pricing. The use of a non-preferred provider was adding undue time and cost to the client’s e-discovery activities.

Refreshes of legal hold policy, e-discovery hosting and inhouse e-discovery practices were in order.

Our Role

With an initial focus on updating the legal hold system within the parameters of the organization’s updated email retention program, FTI evaluated existing legal holds against the 80 active e-discovery matters. In partnership with legal and compliance stakeholders, the team refined the client’s master legal hold tracking workbook and established a new process to uniquely identify custodians and alias information when placing new holds. Holds that were no longer active were remediated, and remaining legal holds were aligned and managed within the legacy on-premise email archive and the client’s new cloud-based archive.

FTI quickly recognized other areas for improvement within the client’s e-discovery response. The knowledge of the environment and legal obligations that the team gleaned during remediation engagements provided a strong foundation to improve e-discovery operations and collection, processing and review workflows. The team stepped in to serve as an extension of the in-house legal team. To date, the team has provided hands-on execution and guidance for numerous data collections and searches across the email archive and file shares for downstream processing and review. FTI has also helped the client transition its hosting and review work to a preferred provider that offers leading analytics features and competitive pricing.

Our Impact

FTI has provided extensive support in setting and scoping legal holds within the email archive, with more than 130 legal holds implemented to date. The team continues to manage the client’s legal hold process to ensure it remains in accordance with the organization’s seven-year retention policy.

A new legal hold policy was established to ensure future legal holds are properly scoped, implemented and managed, and to educate employees of individual obligations under legal holds.

Reduced e-discovery cost and risk through FTI’s involvement as an ongoing e-discovery operations partner.