Reduce downstream eDiscovery costs with activity-based legal holds
Because of the continuous growth of unstructured data, legal teams responsible for litigation and investigations face continuous challenges identifying and preserving data-in-place. With each individual generating approximately 250GB of data annually — and eDiscovery costs averaging $18k per GB processed through review and production (according to RAND Institute for Civil Justice) — the financial impact is substantial. As these data volumes continue to grow, organizations face increasing complexity in executing defensible eDiscovery workflows that can effectively preserve relevant information at its source.
The conventional approach to legal holds typically involves preserving broad swaths of data to ensure compliance, creating significant storage burdens, complicating processing, and inflating downstream review costs. This approach becomes progressively unsustainable for organizations of all sizes, and eDiscovery, while one of the most important, is also often one of the most expensive parts of the litigation process. The market is expected to reach over $15 billion this year and is forecasted to surpass $22 billion over the next five years.
What is a legal hold?
A legal hold is a process organizations use to preserve content that may be relevant to a legal matter, preventing it from being permanently deleted. Legal holds are typically issued in response to current or anticipated litigation, audits, or government investigations. During this process, employees subject to the hold are required to retain all documents and data that could be pertinent to the matter. The primary goal is to ensure that potentially relevant evidence remains intact and accessible.
A smarter way to preserve: Activity-based legal holds
To address the high costs of over-preservation, Box Governance now offers activity-based legal holds, a defensible way to focus preservation efforts on the data that truly matters. This enhancement gives Box Admins greater flexibility when placing legal holds by allowing them to define preservation scope based on interactions, ownership, and/or access. By giving legal teams fine-grained control over what gets held, activity-based legal holds help streamline discovery, reduce downstream processing, and review costs.
This innovation reflects the evolving nature of enterprise collaboration to accommodate dynamic, living content rather than traditional, static communications that sit in a final state. As work becomes increasingly iterative and realtime, governance and eDiscovery processes must evolve in step.
How it works
When adding custodians to a legal hold in Box, Admins can now choose one or more of the following preservation types.
- Interactions: Preserves file versions that a custodian has opened, previewed, edited, downloaded, or moved to trash
- Ownership: Preserves content the custodian owns — including current, future, and files moved to Box Archive
- Access: The original preservation model preserves all files the custodian has access to at the time the hold is placed, including files they interact with and content they own
Integrate with leading eDiscovery tools
Box Governance integrates seamlessly with the leading eDiscovery tools you already use, enabling proactive preservation, analysis, collection, and review of data. By partnering with best-in-class solutions like Exterro, Relativity, and Reveal (Onna, Logikcull), Box helps you maximize existing investments, reduce the risk of data spoliation, and support defensible, data-driven discovery throughout the litigation lifecycle.
Learn more about Box Governance and stay tuned for more information on these upcoming features!
This article is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal advice. If you have any specific questions about your eDiscovery obligations or your compliance thereto, you should consult legal counsel licensed in the applicable jurisdictions before deploying any particular solution.