Legal Aid Society of NYC Selected Mimosa NearPoint

Mimosa Systems, Inc. announced that the Legal Aid Society of New York City has selected the Mimosa NearPoint unified content archiving solution for email retention, eDiscovery, and multi-threaded litigation holds. Mimosa NearPoint provides legal search workflow, immediate mailbox and message recovery, disaster recovery, email, instant message and file archiving, and self-service search and access in one solution.

The Legal Aid Society celebrates Black History Month

Founded in 1876, the Legal Aid Society is the oldest and largest not-for-profit organization in the nation with more than 25 facilities throughout the City’s five boroughs and a staff of more than 1,450, including 850 lawyers. The organization provides free legal assistance in more than 295,000 client matters each year through a comprehensive range of legal services in three areas: Civil, Criminal and Juvenile Rights. The Civil Practice combines individual representation with law reform advocacy, to serve the most vulnerable New Yorkers, including senior citizens, disabled children and adults, survivors of domestic violence, immigrants, low-wage workers, persons living with HIV/AIDS, and homeless and imminently homeless children and adults. The Criminal Practice serves as the primary public defender in New York City, and annually handles approximately 235,000 indigent criminal cases. The Criminal Practice provides representation in criminal trials and appeals as well as parole revocation defense hearings. It has a national reputation for excellence and is often cited as a model for other public defender offices. The Juvenile Rights Practice (JPR) serves as the primary provider of legal services for children in New York City, representing 90 percent of the children who appear before all Family Courts in New York City. JRP is recognized as a leader in the area of child advocacy both nationally and state-wide.

Primary drivers for the Legal Aid Society’s selection of Mimosa NearPoint for use across the organization’s Microsoft Exchange mailboxes included the need to set up protocols and policies for retaining email for eDiscovery so that email was searchable, retrievable, and available to be put under litigation holds defined by legal action. With class action cases lasting many years, the ability of NearPoint to support multiple long-term email retention threads was also a necessity. The NearPoint solution also allows for the optimization of the archive through data de-duplication, enabling significant mailbox growth containment without dramatic increases in storage requirements. Organizational needs to manage the growth of the Microsoft Exchange database while ensuring maximum Exchange server performance and data recoverability were also key requirements easily met by Mimosa NearPoint.

“Having worked with limited solutions in the past that fell short in terms of litigation readiness, it was clear we needed an advanced offering to meet our archiving requirements,” said Edward Braunstein, director of MIS at Legal Aid Society of New York City. “Mimosa NearPoint provides an unmatched range of discovery, system stability, and performance using log shipping versus dated methodologies such as Exchange journaling. Such advanced components of its architecture allow Mimosa NearPoint to preserve rich context across all user mailboxes and public folders—including messages, calendar items, tasks, and contacts—which is essential to meet today’s discovery and compliance requirements.”

Mimosa NearPoint Features Critical to the Legal Aid Society of New York City:

• Efficient and Comprehensive eDiscovery: Mimosa NearPoint has several features that expedite the eDiscovery process by leveraging complete content capture. These features include individual item-level legal holds, conversation and proximity analysis, and an intuitive search within a search—while demonstrating chain of custody as archived content moves through the workflow.
• Continuous Capture and Smart Extraction of Exchange Data: When an eDiscovery or disclosure request is made, Mimosa NearPoint quickly identifies relevant content, including all metadata, emails, folders, deletions, calendars, contacts, notes, and tasks.
• Simple ‘One-Click’ Recovery: Mimosa NearPoint gives the Legal Aid Society continuous protection of all its Exchange information. NearPoint preserves all Exchange information disks, allows users to restore individual messages themselves via Outlook, and enables administrators to restore complete mailboxes and databases with simple “one-click” operations.
• Advanced Legal Hold Capabilities: Up to 64 retention or deletion policies can be applied per object in the Mimosa repository to meet legal hold requirements.

“Adoption by an organization of such seasoned legal professionals is further validation of the dominant technological advantage of Mimosa NearPoint in live content archiving, eDiscovery, and litigation readiness,” said Scott Whitney, vice president of product management, Mimosa Systems. “Once again, our architecture and rich portfolio of features set the pace by which all other solutions in this category are judged.”