Litigation Hold and Web Archiving

  

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Have you been following the Apple vs. Samsung patent trial? We have. Many interesting turns of events populate legal articles across the web, which grab my attention.

There's a lot of analysis of spoliation and what constitutes as failure to produce evidence relevant to individual trials.

In his article on Law.com, Henry Kelston reports that, "On July 25 Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ordered an adverse inference jury instruction against Samsung for failure to take adequate steps to prevent the destruction of relevant emails."

But, what is at the bottom of this adverse inference against Samsung? The failure to institute a litigation hold, or suspend the auto-delete functionality assigned to the management of the company's electronically stored information. If you aren't sure what litigation hold is, this SlideShare primer will help you.

So, how is a litigation hold connected to web archiving? The simplest way to place your web content on litigation hold is to capture your websites, social media, and internal business and collaborative communications in native format archives. An illustration of this is shown in the following diagram:

Proactive Web Archiving

Setting up an archiving policy in anticipation of litigious situations is a key element to your information management best practices. Think of it as an insurance policy. For a small, ongoing fee, you can avoid future risks, costs, and adverse inference by preventing deletion of critical data.

Reactive Web Archiving

Not having a proactive information management policy for your web content isn't a complete crisis, however, because collecting your web content reactively is very straightforward. If you have any legal or other need to preserve your content as it is today, Hanzo can archive it in native format in the same way we do for proactive policies. The only catch is that we can't go back in time and preserve data which is already lost.

Either way, Hanzo Archives can help. If you don't have an archive policy, we can deliver one that meets your needs. In fact, Hanzo Archives technology and services address each phase of eDiscovery as it applies to your website and social media data, from information management to preservation to collection and production. Additionally, our Web Archive Connector packages your web archives and sends them to leading eDiscovery tools for review and processing.

To learn more about how, join us for our latest Webinar: Web Archiving for Websites and Social Media Redux.