Best Practices for Releasing Custodians from Hold in Atlas 6.0.3.x

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In the Atlas eDiscovery Process Management application (we'll refer to as just Atlas) there are multiple ways to initiate the release for a custodian from a legal matter. You can start the release process from a hold notice directly by removing a recipient, or from a request by removing a custodian or by creating a new release notice and adding a custodian as a recipient. All the methods work in the end, but in practice it can get a little confusing depending on the method chosen. Releases are critical to get correct, as a custodian will not be removed from legal hold until that custodian receives a release notice.



Through our work with customers we've identified best practices to help simplify the release process. First in the release process you identify the custodians to be released from a matter and initiate the process. The best place to do this is to go to the matter in Atlas and look at the requests created for that matter. Under each request the "People in Scope" screen will allow you to see if a custodian is still active for that request.



For many customers, there is only one request for a matter where the custodians were added to scope and from which a hold notice was sent. But, if there are multiple requests created for a matter, you will want to check each request for the list of custodians. A key point to remember when releasing custodians is that a release is tied to a specific request. If hold notices were sent from multiple requests, then a release must be initiated from each of those requests in order to properly release the custodians from legal hold for the matter.



When you have identified the request(s) that contain the custodians to be released from hold you can initiate the release process from the "People in Scope" screen. Our recommendation here is to remove each of the custodians and choose the "Remove Custodians from Request and Maintain Hold" option. This action will remove the custodians from being an active recipient on all hold notices associated to the request. This prevents any further reminders from being sent to those custodians. As noted, this action cascades down to all associated hold notices; versus if you were to have initiated the release from an individual hold notice which can result in not properly removing the custodians from all hold notices. By using the "Maintain Hold" option, the Atlas application will still treat the removed custodians as being on hold, but now the custodians will be included in the group of "Release Candidates". The group of "Release Candidates" will come in handy later in the release process.

As a note, if you use the second removal option "Remove Custodians from Request and Release Hold" the Atlas application will force you to jump right into the process of creating the release notice and pre-populate the recipient list. In practice this can lead to confusion as often you may have more custodians to remove first, or you end up cancelling the release notice creation or you may accidentally create multiple release notices when you only wanted to have one. There are some situations where the second option can streamline the release process. For example, if you are ready to immediately send a release for only a couple custodians; but for the majority of situations we recommend the first removal option "Remove Custodians from Request and Maintain Hold".



If you followed our recommendation for removing the custodians from the request, you now have a bunch of custodians in the "Release Candidates" group and the next step is to create the release notice. The best practice here is to always create a release notice from scratch with no custodians pre-populated as recipients. With a brand new release notice you are free to create the notice content and not worry about what happens to the custodians if you somehow need to cancel or deactivate the release notice.



When the release notice content is ready and saved, the next step is to add custodians as recipients to the release notice. You can view the "Recipients" screen for the release notice and from the Add menu select the "Add Release Candidate" option. This will show you a complete list of all the custodians that you removed earlier from the request. From the dialog window you can view up to 1000 custodians per page and use the checkbox option to the left of the headers to select all custodians on the page to add. Then by clicking the "Add" button all of the selected custodians will be added as recipients to the release notice. After reviewing the list of recipients and verifying that the release notice content is correct you can finish the process and publish the release notice.

In summary here are the best practices for releasing custodians from legal hold:

1. Initiate the release process for custodians from the Matter > Request > People in Scope screen.
2. Remove custodians using the "Remove Custodians from Request and Maintain Hold" option.
3. Draft a brand new release notice from scratch with no custodians pre-populated as recipients.
4. Add custodians as recipients to the release notice from the "Release Candidates" tab.