A Focus on Customer Service: Legal Hold Management at Family Dollar

Family Dollar Stores is a neighborhood-based convenience and value retailer with more than 6,600 locations in 44 states, and more than 45,000 full-time employees.

As the director of litigation support, I work with a team of 26 attorneys and various information technology (IT) professionals. I am the primary driver for all e-discovery, information life cycle management, privacy and litigation management processes. At any one time, Family Dollar has dozens of professionals collaborating on multiple pending cases in a variety of fields.

Communication Breakdown:
Cumbersome Legal Hold Process

We send out litigation holds almost daily to up to 400 custodians at a time, including anyone from store managers to senior organization officers. e-Mail is the most commonly targeted type of data in our holds, but we also often place holds on a wide variety of other data, including unstructured file network-situated data and structured data; and we decide what to hold based on the nature of each case.

In developing our litigation hold process, we had created a manual approach to the large number of litigation holds we managed. However, we found the process to be very labor-intensive. When a triggering event came to our attention, we issued a hold notice via our corporate e-mail accounts and hard copy. We tracked the details of each legal hold, including reminders and hold releases, using Excel spreadsheets.

We found this process to be lacking, and determined we needed a “one-stop” communication link with custodians, with automated audit trails. We also wanted to move away from the practice of regularly using outside counsel to handle the creation of custom legal hold notices for our litigation portfolio. We knew it was time to rethink our legal hold process.

Finding the Right Solution

We decided that automating our legal hold process was the best way we could give good service to the business people with whom we work while also mitigating risk for the organization and reducing the time spent on the legal hold process.

We came up with several requirements going into our search for an automated solution. First, we needed it to capture and create audit trails of all hold activity. Second, we needed a solution that would provide a centralized way to manage legal hold responses and answer custodian and data stewards' questions. Third, it needed to be intuitive and easy to use without specialized training. Finally, it needed to be cost-effective.

I began my search by looking at automated legal hold solutions from several leading legal software providers. While many offered several features we needed, an in-depth analysis of Exterro's Fusion Legal Hold revealed it to be the best fit for Family Dollar's needs.

Exterro's Fusion Legal Hold met all of our requirements, and offered several additional features that made our decision an easy one:

• A secure, audited and direct link between custodians and legal teams that would allow custodians to ask questions and our legal teams to answer them from a central repository;
• Superior integration capabilities, including the ability to integrate with our HR system and existing matter management system; and
• Competitive price point.

Implementing Fusion

The implementation process went extremely smoothly. We chose to keep Fusion Legal Hold behind Exterro's firewall, allowing us to forego on-site installation; and implementing the ASP model was a simple, easy process. Exterro had a solid implementation plan before rollout, and we were quickly able to leverage its integration capabilities to incorporate our pre-existing technology with Fusion. Our transition was seamless and there was neither significant interruption in our day-to-day activities nor any system compatibility issues. I worked with our IT department and Exterro's client success and engineering teams to deploy Fusion Legal Hold and its features:

• Fusion's integration points enabled us to feed custodian data to Fusion from our HRIS system and Oracle e-Business Suite, and link Fusion's functionality to our custodians via Microsoft Exchange Server. This eliminated any need to manually enter custodian information into Fusion; with approximately 3,500 users ' that's a major time savings.
• Fusion Legal Hold's notification management increased efficiency by automating and simplifying the process of creating legal holds, identifying custodians and data, and issuing legal hold notifications. Additionally, automated notifications enable our IT team to know what data needs to be retained without the legal department having to initiate a separate workflow to communicate with them.
• Fusion's unique collaborative tools enabled us to share the identities of custodians with our IT department in real-time. The collaborative tool we've found to be most useful is what we call the “ask questions” feature. Custodians in the field and IT managers can immediately send their hold-related questions to us via Fusion, without having to either log out of the system or pick up the phone to call us. Our answers flow back to them immediately, and the whole conversation is tracked and tied to the hold itself for future reference.
• Fusion's audit trails created efficient defensibility and cut down on the time spent tracking holds by enabling our users to see, at a glance and in real time, who has and who has not responded to each hold notice. We can view event history for a hold or matter, and export a timeline if necessary.
• Fusion's hold templates reduced the time spent on creating new legal holds by about half, proving particularly indispensible for large litigation projects.
• Fusion's release process allows increased efficiency by enabling us to release legal holds with just a couple clicks of a mouse, freeing our IT department to return affected data to its regular retention and destruction cycle and allowing for timely data disposition.

Getting buy-in from our constituents was fairly easy. I sat with each attorney and paralegal while they created their first legal hold, and overall it took about two weeks to get everyone comfortable with the new technology and associated process. One of my most difficult-to-please paralegals even walked into my office and said, “I love this thing.” Overall, we had a very positive response from the legal team as well as the custodians and IT team members.

End Results

With Fusion in place, once a triggering event comes to our attention, a member of the legal team can immediately create a legal hold by choosing the template appropriate to matter type and modifying it as necessary, or creating a new hold using Fusion's simple three-step wizard. The hold is then approved and sent out rapidly via Fusion's messaging system, with built-in escalations and reminder parameters. Fusion tracks and audits all activities related to that hold, alerts the legal team when action is needed, and allows our custodians to ask questions and our attorneys to answer immediately. When the matter is resolved, the hold is released with the click of a mouse.