Autonomy ZANTAZ Announces First Comprehensive Legal Hold Solution for Immediate and On-Going Preservation of Relevant Informatio

CAMBRIDGE, England and PLEASANTON, California, December 3 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- ZANTAZ, an Autonomy company and the leader in the archiving, eDiscovery and Proactive Information Risk Management (IRM) markets, (LSE: AU. or AU.L), today announced Desktop Legal Hold, the industry's first comprehensive solution that enables corporate legal and IT departments to remotely enforce legal hold across desktops and laptops. Unlike other systems, Desktop Legal Hold does not require a continuous network connection for discovery. Information and metadata are preserved locally and continuously in real-time. The solution locks down the original files in place and can collect them when an Internet connection is established. Applying advanced conceptual and keyword legal search, all information relevant to legal matters is preserved, maintaining the audit trail and forensic credibility while dramatically reducing the legal risk of fines and sanctions associated with non-compliance to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) for eDiscovery.

In the report, Warning: Combine Process Methodology and Technology to Execute Litigation Holds (Forrester Research, Inc., July 2007 ) Barry Murphy writes: "The US courts show no mercy to organizations that claim ignorance about the processes or technology to preserve potentially relevant information. In the court's eyes, there is simply no excuse for being unable to find information - whether it be emails, instant messages, voicemails, desktop files, or even ERP data - when requested."

An industry first, Desktop Legal Hold addresses the invincible gap that exists in electronic discovery between information stored on networks and laptops due to the lack of standardization, continuous offline status and multiple formats and locations. Current solutions are inherently flawed as they require user intervention and compliance which runs the risk of spoliation; or 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.

"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. "There can be immeasurable value in this type of solution given the mobility of today's workforce and the rising volume of information that users create that never hits the corporate network. The ability to capture, hold and produce this data securely and automatically can significantly reduce the enormous cost and risk organizations face today when dealing with e-discovery."

Built on Autonomy's award-winning Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), Desktop Legal Hold provides automatic and on-going preservation of information using the full array of keyword and Boolean rules, metadata and conceptual search to uniquely cull down data volumes by intelligently identifying all types of information relevant to legal hold policies. Desktop Legal Hold:

- Proactively monitors all information that comes across the screen or is stored on the hard drive including PDFs, emails, and instant messages (without the need for a network connection) and locks it down in place preserving data so that it can't be deleted or changed,

- Collects all data from files including versioning, hidden changes, recycle bin and deleted items and retrieves information from the "empty" space on hard drives,

- Automatically overcomes spoliation, obfuscation, misclassification and non-classification of important data,

- Delivers advanced technology for remote forensics, data loss prevention, and original file preservation at the sector level, and

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