Who is responsible for placing and lifting a legal hold, and is it legal, IT, or the records officer?

A legal hold (sometimes called a litigation hold or preservation hold) suspends the normal destruction of records that may be relevant to anticipated or active litigation, an investigation, an audit, or another legal matter. The common question is which single role “owns” it. The honest answer is that no one role does it alone. Placing and lifting a hold is a shared responsibility, with each function playing a distinct part.

Who Does What

Legal counsel decides. The trigger for a hold is a legal judgment about when litigation or an investigation is reasonably anticipated. Counsel determines the scope, the relevant time frame, and which people (custodians) and record types are covered. Legal also decides when the duty to preserve ends, which means legal authorizes the lifting of the hold. This is the decision-making center.

The records or information governance officer operationalizes. Records management translates the legal scope into practice: identifying where the relevant records live, suspending applicable retention schedules so nothing is destroyed on its normal timeline, documenting what is held, and tracking the hold over time. When legal releases the hold, the records officer restores normal retention.

IT executes the technical controls. IT applies the actual preservation mechanisms, such as freezing mailboxes, disabling auto-deletion, capturing backups, and placing systems or repositories in a preservation state. IT acts on instructions from legal and records, not on its own authority.

How the Workflow Runs

A sound process usually follows these steps:

• Trigger and decision: Legal recognizes a duty to preserve and issues the hold.
• Notice: Custodians receive clear written instructions and acknowledge them.
• Implementation: Records and IT identify, suspend retention, and apply technical preservation.
• Maintenance: The hold is monitored, and new custodians or data sources are added as needed.
• Release: Legal confirms the matter is closed and authorizes lifting; records and IT then resume normal retention.

The Bottom Line

Legal owns the decision, records governs the records and retention exceptions, and IT performs the technical preservation. Strong organizations write these responsibilities into a documented hold policy so that holds are defensible, consistently applied, and properly released. Defensibility depends on a repeatable, well-documented process more than on any single department.

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