Sonasoft has added the ability for automated legal hold in its email archiving and eDiscovery solutions. This allows users to retain email that has been identified by certain content criteria even after the retention period has expired.

Flagged emails are not purged and held securely until these emails have been examined and the reviewer has marked them as closed. Only after this review process is completed are the held emails released and are subject to expire if applicable.

“Several customers of Sonasoft have welcomed our automated legal hold feature in our eDiscovery platform”, said Bilal Ahmed, CTO and Vice President of Engineering.

“They appreciate that all they had to do is identify criteria such as a keyword or sender in the archive. All emails that then meet the identified criteria, such as credit card information, social security numbers, insider trading information, etc., automatically are flagged. These flagged emails are never purged from the archive even after the retention policy has expired.

“For instance, if a customer has a retention policy to retain email for seven years and to purge emails from the archive that are older than seven years, then our automatic eDiscovery legal hold feature safely will retain these emails as long as needed, even if the seven year period has passed. Of course, our customers also have the flexibility to flag email manually in addition to our automated legal hold feature. This design allows our customers to achieve the maximum benefit and obtain peace of mind when an eDiscovery request needs to be fulfilled.”

http://www.sonasoft.com/products/sonavault-email-archiving-software/