Guidance Adds Legal Hold

PASADENA, Calif. -- Guidance Software Inc. (NASDAQ: GUID), the World Leader in Digital Investigations, today announced EnCase® Legal Hold, a web-based litigation hold and tracking solution that is tightly integrated with EnCase® eDiscovery, the industry standard for the identification, search, collection, preservation and processing of electronically stored information (ESI). This integrated solution enables corporate legal departments not only to identify and notify custodians for legal preservation holds at the outset of litigation, but also to manage, track and report on the actual preservation, collection, and processing of ESI.

Applicable law requires litigants to preserve potentially relevant information when litigation can reasonably be anticipated. Many current litigation hold solutions, however, do not provide an integrated technical means to systematically collect and process data from custodians subject to litigation holds. Instead of an integrated solution, they merely send and track emails to custodians, often while promoting custodian self-collection, which has drawn harsh scrutiny from the courts and presents risks such as non-compliance, under- or over-collection, metadata alteration or spoliation, inadequate chain of custody documentation, authentication challenges and business disruption.

EnCase Legal Hold’s tight integration with EnCase eDiscovery makes it possible not only to notify and interview custodians, but also to track and report on the collection and processing of ESI performed with EnCase eDiscovery. Using a single case database, customers can issue litigation holds, interview custodians, monitor compliance with the holds and track the progress of collection and processing of potentially relevant ESI.

“All too often, companies rely on email notification solutions to address the duty to preserve relevant ESI,” said Victor Limongelli, President and CEO of Guidance Software. “Guidance Software developed EnCase Legal Hold so that organizations could address the duty to preserve relevant ESI in a manner that is systemized, repeatable and defensible. It gives counsel full control over the entire spectrum of the litigation hold process, and provides detailed reports, on a per-custodian or per-case basis, regarding the collection and processing of ESI.”

Guidance Software Inc.