When it comes to your business’s legal side, there’s only one word that matters: compliance. And when a reasonable expectation of litigation exists, organizations are expected to comply by preserving electronically stored information (ESI), including emails that are relevant to the case.
This expectation often exists before the specifics of the case are known and preservation is often broad. Organizations may need to preserve all emails related to a specific topic or all emails for certain individuals.
To make this process easy, Microsoft’s Modern Office suite offers a variety of features to make litigation holds for users easy. Litigation holds help maintain compliance with any workplace legal issues, so it’s important that they happen the right way.
In this guide, we’re going to break down what a litigation hold is, how Modern Office’s features can benefit your business, and some information on how our experts can help your business implement the Modern Office suite.
What is Litigation Hold in Modern Office?
A litigation hold (sometimes called a legal hold) is when you alert employees and inform them that they need to refrain from deleting electronically stored information (ESI) or physical documents that pertain to potential or current litigation. Organizations are usually responsible for developing their own litigation hold process. Some businesses hire legal teams, while others choose to handle the process internally.
With Modern Office and Microsoft 365, you are given all the tools you need to handle a litigation hold process yourself. You can place any mailbox on litigation hold to retain all its content, including deleted items and messages (as well as their original versions, if they’ve been modified).
How Will Modern Office and Litigation Holds Benefit Your Business?
Microsoft’s litigation hold suite has many features to help ensure you comply with any litigation your business faces, present or future.
Different Hold Length Options
When you place a user’s mailbox on litigation hold, the content in their archive mailbox is retained. You can determine a hold duration when you create a hold so that deleted and modified items and messages are kept for the specified time period before being permanently deleted. On the other hand, you can also retain content indefinitely (this is called an infinite hold)—or until the litigation hold is removed.
Gives You Access to All Items
With Modern Office, items deleted by employees whose inboxes are on hold are retained in the Recoverable Items folder in the user’s mailbox for the duration of the hold. This ensures that no items or messages that are relevant to the litigation go missing. As mentioned earlier, this also includes items in the user’s archive mailbox.
Increased Item Storage Capacity
Modern Office litigation hold features also include 110 GB of storage in the Recoverable Items folder. This allows you to store every item and message pertaining to the hold with ease.
Make Important Items Easy to Find
The litigation hold suite also allows you to use the query-based In-Place Hold to search for and retain items that match specific criteria. This makes it easy for you to find key information and group it together if necessary.
Options for Multiple Holds
You can also place a user on multiple holds for different cases or investigations if your business is involved in more than one. This makes it easy to keep items and messages organized and ready for anything.
How Can WheelHouse IT Help Your Business Implement Modern Office and Litigation Hold?
At WheelHouse IT, we want to see your business succeed. We have a dedicated and experienced team of managed IT professionals who can help you navigate this new, modern workplace and help you implement Microsoft Modern Office and litigation hold measures for your business.
Work with a team that is knowledgeable and has experience with Modern Office by getting in touch with us today. Microsoft Modern Office litigation hold features make maintaining the security and integrity of your business, messages, and employees simple as you continue to work remotely—and WheelHouse IT has the experts to help you implement it effectively.
Let’s work together to make sure your business remains as effective, productive, and secure as possible.
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