Legal Hold
A legal hold is a directive that suspends the normal disposition of records and other information relevant to anticipated or pending litigation, investigation, or audit, requiring that those materials be preserved unaltered.
Legal hold is the process by which an organization identifies, locates, and preserves records and electronically stored information that may be relevant to current or reasonably foreseeable litigation, an investigation, or an audit. When a hold is issued, the affected materials are exempted from any scheduled destruction under the retention schedule, and routine disposition is paused until the hold is released.
Legal holds matter to recordkeeping because the duty to preserve can override an otherwise valid disposition action. Destroying records subject to a hold, even unintentionally through automated deletion, can constitute spoliation and expose the organization to sanctions. Sound practice ties holds to custodians, defensible documentation, and audit trails so preservation can be proven.
A useful distinction: a retention schedule tells you when records may be destroyed, while a legal hold tells you when you must stop. The hold acts as a temporary freeze layered on top of normal lifecycle management, lifted only when the matter concludes and a formal release is documented.