Zantaz Holds Desktops for Compliance

December 5, 2007: Archiving, eDiscovery and Proactive Information Risk Management firm Zantaz has announced a new piece of software that it claims can help organisations forensically preserve, protect emails and files relevant to litigation, without continuous network connections.

Called Desktop Legal Hold, Zantaz claims the software is the industry's first solution that enables corporate legal and IT departments to remotely enforce legal hold across desktops and laptops.

The company claims other solutions currently in use are flawed as they either require user intervention and compliance which runs the risk of spoliation, or complete imaging of hard drives, snapshots of folders and remote spidering of desktops - all of which capture irrelevant and personal data resulting in over retention, network overload and the potential violation of user privacy laws.

Desktop Legal Hold on the other hand, preserves information and metadata locally in real-time. Original files are locked in place and can be collected whenever an Internet connection is established.

Beyond this, the software also includes conceptual and keyword legal search and all information relevant to legal matters is preserved. Zantaz says this maintains the audit trail and forensic credibility while reducing the risk of fines.

“The ability of companies to effectively comply with preservation obligations involved in e-Discovery has been the most pressing issue for corporate counsel, as can be seen by the numbers of spoliation allegations over the last few years,” said Tom Allman, retired general counsel of BASF Corporation and leading proponent of the 2006 Federal Amendments for E-Discovery.

“The ability to capture, hold and produce this data securely and automatically can significantly reduce the enormous cost and risk organisations face today when dealing with e-discovery.”

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