A legal hold is a process organizations use to preserve electronically stored information (ESI) and documents that may be relevant to litigation, investigations, audits, or regulatory matters.
If you have not had experience with the level of litigation involving a legal hold, having questions is natural. Legal holds require an organization involved in litigation to retain certain records or internal communications. While this process can seem daunting, there are tools that could make things simpler. Hanzo Illuminate could review all of your data and secure the information needed for any current or potential litigation.
A legal hold, sometimes called a litigation hold, is a directive that an organization issues to preserve information that may be relevant to pending or reasonably anticipated litigation. When a legal hold starts, the relevant organizations must suspend routine document destruction practices for specific records, data, and communications that could serve as evidence in a dispute. This ensures that the information remains intact and accessible for the discovery process, where parties exchange evidence to substantiate claims and defenses.
Legal holds can apply to a wide range of materials, including: emails; documents; business records; policies; communications between employees or external parties.
The scope is typically defined by legal counsel and tailored to the issues involved in the matter. Learning what a legal hold is and properly implementing it is critical. Failure to preserve relevant information can result in serious consequences.
When should a legal hold be issued?
Legal holds should be issued as soon as an organization reasonably anticipates litigation, a regulatory investigation or any matter that could require the preservation of potentially relevant information. Waiting too long to initiate a legal hold can increase the risk of evidence being altered, deleted, or lost, which may lead to legal penalties or accusations of spoliation.
Legal holds are commonly triggered by:
Once the duty to preserve arises, organizations must take reasonable steps to identify custodians and preserve electronically stored information (ESI) that may be relevant to the matter.
In modern enterprises, this often includes data spread across collaboration platforms such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Google Workspace, email systems, cloud storage platforms, and mobile communications.
While workflows vary between organizations, most legal hold procedures follow several core steps.
The process begins when a regulatory matter such as a litigation or an investigation is anticipated. Legal teams assess the matter and determine whether preservation obligations exist.
Organizations identify the types of data, systems, custodians, departments, and timeframes that may be relevant to the matter.
Legal hold notices are distributed to employees and stakeholders who may possess relevant information. These notices explain preservation obligations and instruct custodians not to delete or alter relevant data.
Organizations suspend applicable deletion policies and preserve relevant data sources. This may include preserving cloud collaboration platforms, email systems, file repositories, and project management tools.
Legal and compliance teams monitor acknowledgements, reminders, and custodian compliance throughout the lifecycle of the legal hold.
As the matter progresses, preserved information may be collected and reviewed for investigations, eDiscovery, audits, or litigation proceedings.
Once the matter is fully resolved, organizations formally release the legal hold and resume standard retention and deletion policies where appropriate.
Modern legal hold workflows rely on automation to manage preservation obligations across rapidly changing cloud and collaboration environments.
Common types of data preserved during a legal hold include:
Legal holds were once a comparatively straightforward exercise focused on suspending the deletion of emails or the destruction of paper records. Today, however, the process has become significantly more complex due to the proliferation of digital communication platforms and collaboration tools. Information that may be relevant to litigation is not confined to a few repositories.
Instead, dozens of different applications could store a company’s data, including the following: Slack; Microsoft Teams; Asana; Jira; Zoom; Salesforce; Google Workspace.
These platforms generate fast-moving data that may include messages, comments, tasks, attachments, reactions, recordings,etc. Each element could be relevant in litigation, but the process for retaining them might differ dramatically from one platform to another. The expansion of digital workspaces has turned preservation into a multi-system, multi-format challenge that can be especially hard for smaller organizations.
A legal hold process is only effective if it actually works in practice. Sending out a preservation notice is one thing. Making sure relevant data is preserved across dozens of systems, employees, and collaboration platforms is something else entirely.
The biggest mistakes usually happen when organizations rely on manual processes for too long or underestimate how quickly modern data changes. Messages get edited, files are overwritten, employees move teams, and retention policies continue running in the background unless someone actively intervenes.
One of the most important best practices is issuing legal holds early. As soon as litigation or an investigation becomes reasonably likely, legal teams should act quickly to identify potentially relevant data and preserve it before anything is lost. Waiting too long can create unnecessary risk and make preservation much harder later.
It’s also important to clearly define the scope of the hold from the beginning. That means identifying which custodians, systems, communication platforms, and time periods are relevant to the matter. Without a clear scope, organizations often end up either overpreserving massive amounts of unnecessary data or missing critical information altogether.
Modern collaboration platforms add another layer of complexity. A large portion of business communication now happens in Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Zoom, and Google Workspace rather than traditional email. These platforms contain dynamic content that changes constantly, including edited messages, reactions, comments, attachments, and version histories. Preserving only static exports or partial conversations can create gaps in the record.
That’s why many organizations are moving toward automated legal hold workflows. Automation helps legal and compliance teams issue notices, track acknowledgements, send reminders, and maintain audit trails without relying on spreadsheets and manual follow-ups. It also creates a more defensible process if preservation decisions are later challenged during litigation or regulatory review.
Documentation matters just as much as preservation itself. Legal teams should maintain clear records of when holds were issued, which custodians were notified, what systems were preserved, and any actions taken to suspend deletion policies. Detailed audit trails help demonstrate that the organization took reasonable and defensible steps to preserve relevant information.
Finally, legal holds should not be treated as “set it and forget it” processes. Active holds should be reviewed regularly to ensure they still apply, remain appropriately scoped, and reflect changes in the underlying matter. As organizations grow more dependent on cloud collaboration tools, ongoing coordination between legal, IT, compliance, records management, and security teams becomes essential to managing preservation effectively at scale.
Modern technology also provides you with helpful options for preserving and retaining the vast amounts of unstructured data that are common with popular collaboration tools such as Slack. When relying on these tools for a legal hold, there are a few important features you should keep in mind. Most importantly, you need to be able to preserve and maintain this data without disrupting your workflow. Your business cannot stop operating in order to preserve this data.
You could also save time and money by using tools that make it easy to target specific data. Legal holds do not necessarily cover every text message or Slack channel, and the right tools can distinguish between what is required and what is not.
Finally, it is crucial that you retain records across every collaboration platform, even those you seldom use. From Slack to Teams, you must maintain data from every app your organization uses.
Given all of the collaboration tools available, you need an instrument that easily collects and retains all of the relevant data from every communication channel you use without disrupting your operations. That is where Hanzo Illuminate provides a solution.
With Illuminate, you could easily review and retain this data without slowing down your workflow or missing vital pieces that could violate the hold. Contact Hanzo to learn more.
Content Team 
Hanzo
N/a
© Hanzo. 2026 | All rights reserved.