Hintyr includes built-in custodian management so you can track which individuals or entities are responsible for the documents in your case. Assign files to custodians, organize productions by custodian, and keep a clear record of document provenance throughout your review.
What custodians are
In legal proceedings, a custodian is a person or entity who has possession, custody, or control of potentially relevant documents. When you collect emails, contracts, financial records, or other files for review, tracking which custodian produced each document is important for compliance, privilege analysis, and production.
Hintyr lets you create custodians within each case and assign files to them. Custodians can be individual people (like employees or parties to a matter) or entities (like departments or corporate subsidiaries). This flexibility accommodates a wide range of document review workflows.
Why custodian tracking matters
Custodian tracking serves several purposes during document review:
- Production requirements - Many jurisdictions and discovery orders require productions organized by custodian. The export wizard can generate custodian-based directory structures automatically.
- Privilege review - Knowing which custodian produced a document helps reviewers assess privilege claims and spot potentially privileged communications.
- Compliance and defensibility - A clear record of custodian-to-document associations supports your ability to demonstrate a thorough review process.
- Filtering and organization - Custodian assignments make it easy to filter the document browser and focus on a specific custodian's files during review.
How custodians work in Hintyr
Custodians are scoped to individual cases. Each case has its own list, and the same person can appear as a custodian in multiple cases independently. You create custodians through Case Settings, the file context menu, or during file upload. Once created, you can assign one or more files to each custodian and assign multiple custodians to a single file.
The Custodians panel in Case Settings gives you a centralized view of all custodians along with the number of files assigned to each. From this panel you can add, rename, and delete custodians. For step-by-step instructions, explore the guides below.