The legal hold process is the critical foundation of e-discovery projects to come, and technologies that help the legal department notify custodians and track progress have become common tools in the connected office.

But despite advances, most legal departments still rely on manual processes to notify custodians, collect responses, and track progress of the project, according to a new benchmarking survey from Zapproved, the company behind Legal Hold Pro. The report shows the prevalence of automated/manual legal hold options, and seeks to define their impact on the quality and efficiencies of discovery projects.

Granted, the litigation profile, organization size and volume of information generated deeply impacts the needs for such tools, but the survey indicates that for adopters the benefits are many. According to “The Legal Hold and Data Preservation Benchmark Survey 2015” released earlier this week, 45.7 percent of respondents currently use automated legal hold tools, with the remainder employing manual forms of notification and tracking. As a subset of those still manual processes, around 3 percent instituted holds verbally.