A custodian is a person or entity with possession, custody, or control of potentially relevant documents. Hintyr lets you create custodians within each case, assign files to them, and use custodian data throughout your review and production workflow.
What is a custodian
A custodian is any individual or organizational entity that holds, manages, or controls documents relevant to a legal matter. In litigation and regulatory investigations, identifying custodians is one of the first steps in the discovery process. Common examples include employees whose email accounts are collected and departments that manage shared file repositories.
Custodians aren't limited to natural persons. An entity like a corporate department, subsidiary, or external vendor can also serve as a custodian if it holds relevant documents. In Hintyr, you can create entries for both individuals and entities, giving you the flexibility to model your case's custodian structure accurately.
Why custodian tracking matters
Tracking custodians throughout the review lifecycle serves several purposes:
- Production requirements - Courts and opposing counsel frequently require productions organized by custodian. Keeping custodian assignments in Hintyr means you can generate custodian-based productions directly from the export wizard.
- Privilege review - Knowing who produced a document helps you evaluate attorney-client privilege and work product claims. A document from in-house counsel carries different privilege considerations than one from a sales representative.
- Compliance and defensibility - A documented record of custodian-to-document associations supports defensibility if the review process is later challenged. It shows your team accounted for all relevant sources.
- Workflow organization - Assigning custodians lets reviewers filter and focus on one custodian's documents at a time, which is a common workflow in large matters.
Custodians are case-scoped
Each case in Hintyr maintains its own independent list of custodians. Custodians aren't shared across cases, and there's no global custodian directory. This design ensures each matter's custodian structure is self-contained and doesn't expose information between unrelated cases.
If the same individual appears as a custodian in multiple matters, you create a separate entry in each case. This keeps custodian data isolated and prevents cross-matter data exposure, which is especially important when different cases involve different teams or clients with distinct access permissions.
Files and custodians relationship
The relationship between files and custodians is many-to-many. A single file can be assigned to multiple custodians, and a custodian can have many files. This reflects real-world scenarios where the same email or document may exist in multiple custodians' collections.
For example, an email sent between two custodians may need to be associated with both the sender and the recipient. Hintyr supports this without requiring duplicate copies. You simply assign the same file to both custodians. To learn how, see assigning files to custodians.