Stout was engaged to provide one year of post-implementation consulting and technical support to a Fortune 250 energy company’s legal and IT team that had just deployed a new legal hold platform.

The client wanted on-demand expertise, supplemental training, and additional hands-on support above and beyond what the software vendor provided given the complexity of its processes, breadth of its integrations, limited bandwidth, and the change management needs of its legal, IT, forensics, and compliance team stakeholders.

We supported its users and system administrators through an adoption and stabilization period and advised on how they could mature its legal hold and eDiscovery program. The client subsequently renewed Stout’s legal hold support subscription for three consecutive years.

A representative sample of the services we provided during this period include:

System administration and template management to ease the client’s administrative burden and position its resources to focus on higher-value work.

Associated tasks included adding/removing users; managing user roles and permissions; troubleshooting system issues, tracking enhancement requests, and refreshing legal hold, interview, and collection request templates; overseeing report templates and schedules; managing system settings (e.g., notification settings); and more.

Software release testing to ensure business processes and integrations were working as expected following an upgrade or patch deployment, and that the upgrade did not result in the disruption of system functionality and/or data loss.

Process improvement initiatives to achieve additional operational efficiencies, capitalize on a new or underutilized feature, enhance data quality, and/or mitigate risk.

We helped design, configure, test, and deploy new workflows and software features to:

• Issue and respond to third-party preservation requests
• Systematically monitor and report on legal hold compliance rates and other risks areas
• Automate email and chat preservation processes to comply with regulatory requirements
• Track and manage employee transfers, terminations, and new hires
• Submit data processing and production requests
• Enhance scoping and reporting (we backfilled human resource data for thousands of terminated employees)

User and system admin training at the group- and individual-level for new hires and existing employees across its legal (attorneys and paralegals), IT, forensics, and compliance teams.

Integration support across its human resources, matter management, asset management, application portfolio, and Microsoft 365 interfaces.

We provided on-demand operational support and troubleshooting, scoped and configured new human resource fields, guided Microsoft 365 service account upgrades, advised on API deployment, and supported conversions to new matter management and asset portfolio systems.