How Businesses Should Protect Evidence During A Lawsuit Or Internal Investigation

Your company may be involved in a lawsuit where it is either the defendant or plaintiff. In either scenario, you’ll need to collect a lot of evidence to use throughout the case. The same applies to internal investigations that happen within your company – but how do you ensure the evidence remains protected?

Unprotected evidence can be tampered with or deleted, causing havoc during the legal process. In some cases it can mean you default immediately and lose the lawsuit. For internal investigations, missing or spoiled evidence could mean you reach an incorrect outcome. While it may seem hard to guarantee that all evidence stays protected, here are three things you should try:

Announce A Legal Hold Right Away

Start things off by working with your lawyer to initiate a legal hold. For those who’ve never been in any legal predicament before, a legal hold is an order for everyone in your business to stop doing anything that could tamper with your evidence.

This basically includes editing or deleting any documents or digital evidence of any kind. A legal hold means they are legally obliged to keep things as they are, so you can hold onto all of the evidence that may be relevant to the court case or internal investigation. You can use legal hold software to do this – and some of the advanced systems will alert you if an employee breaches the legal hold.

Lock Down All Digital Evidence

It’s important to realize that a legal hold is simply something you issue – it won’t magically stop your evidence from being altered, though you should be notified if that happens. The right legal hold software will also let you lock down all of your digital evidence to preserve it in its original state.

In other words, it can save and create copies of the evidence when you initiate the legal hold. This way, it won’t matter if an employee somehow manages to tamper or delete files on their computer; you’ve got all the evidence from before this happened.

Utilize Private Cloud eDiscovery

Where will you store all of your evidence, and how can you guarantee nobody will gain access to it? The secret lies in private cloud eDiscovery, which lets you store and collect all of your data in a private cloud, giving you the power to determine who has access to the server. This lets you protect your evidence and keep an eye on who’s accessing it.

You also benefit from being able to use eDiscovery to search through the evidence and find whatever you’re looking for. It’s incredibly handy when you need to find specific evidence to support something in your case/investigation, saving a lot of time and money.

With these three implementations in place, your business will protect all evidence during a lawsuit or internal investigation. A legal hold puts your employees on notice and ensures they stop deleting or editing any data. Locking down digital evidence with the right software will preserve it before anyone has a chance to touch it, and a private cloud keeps it all behind very closed doors.