Extract from Zapproved’s article “How a Custodian Portal Can Help Corporate Legal Teams Fulfill Legal Holds”
You might be wondering, what exactly is a custodian portal? Why is it important? And more importantly, why should you care? Well, a custodian portal is an incredibly useful tool to help drive compliance rates for legal holds and bolster your company’s defensibility around ediscovery processes.
This is especially helpful to teams dealing with a large number of holds at once, where doing any help to ensure that custodians can manage their holds efficiently will help increase compliance. Depending on their data custodial responsibilities and/or job function, some custodians may have hundreds of holds themselves, each of which comes with its own notice and attachments. So for many custodians, keeping track of all of their legal hold obligations can be a daunting task. Here’s where the custodian portal comes in.
For Starters, What Is a Custodian Portal?
A custodian portal is a self-serve tool that shows custodians a comprehensive view of all of their legal hold obligations, including the information and dates of all of the legal holds that have been issued to them, which holds they have already accepted, and which holds they have been released from. Custodian portals drive up custodian hold compliance by allowing custodians to accept any and all delinquent holds right from the portal, meaning there’s no need for custodians to go back and find the original hold notice. By showing which holds custodians have been released from, custodian portals can also help ensure data is not preserved longer than is needed, reducing risk and data storage costs. The custodian portal is most often accessed through a link embedded in the legal hold notice email.
