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Glossary

What is a legal hold?

A legal hold, or litigation hold, is an instruction to preserve documents and data that may be relevant to litigation, an investigation or a regulatory inquiry.

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How a legal hold works

When litigation or an investigation is reasonably expected, the legal team identifies the people who hold relevant information, known as custodians, and sends them a hold notice. The notice explains what must be preserved, including contracts, emails, electronic records, paper files and data in cloud systems, and that normal deletion must stop for those records.

Why it matters

A legal hold protects potential evidence so it cannot be changed, deleted or destroyed. Courts and regulators can penalize an organization that loses relevant records after it should have preserved them, so the hold must be issued promptly, acknowledged by custodians and enforced in the systems where the records live.

Managing a hold well

  • Issue the notice quickly and in plain language.
  • Track who has acknowledged it, and follow up with those who have not.
  • Suspend automatic deletion for the records in scope.
  • Review the scope as the matter develops.
  • Release the hold formally when the matter ends.

How Aavenir handles it

Contracts are often central to a dispute. Contractflow keeps every contract, version, amendment and approval in one repository with a full audit trail, so legal can find what is in scope and show it has not been altered.

Keep reading

Breach of contract A breach of contract is a failure by one party to do what the contract requires, without a lawful excuse.Read more Contract versions Contract versions are the successive drafts of a contract, tracked so everyone knows which one is current.Read more Conformed contract A conformed contract is a clean copy of a contract that folds in every agreed change, so one document shows the current terms.Read more

Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

Common questions

When should a legal hold be issued?

As soon as litigation, an investigation or a regulatory inquiry is reasonably anticipated, not only once a claim is filed. Waiting risks losing records that the organization was already obliged to keep. Read about breach of contract.

What records does a legal hold cover?

Anything that may be relevant to the matter: contracts and their versions, emails, chat messages, documents, databases and paper files, wherever they are stored. The hold notice should define the scope clearly. Read about contract versions.

Who is responsible for a legal hold?

The legal department, or outside counsel, issues and manages the hold. Custodians must preserve their records, and IT must make sure systems do not delete them automatically while the hold is active. See Contractflow.

Have a question we have not answered? Ask the Expert

Schedule a demo

See your contracts run on one record.

  • 1 A 30 minute walkthrough Built around your team, whether that is procurement, legal, IT or finance.
  • 2 Your contracts, not ours Bring a few sample agreements and watch Aavenir AI extract and review them.
  • 3 ServiceNow or standalone We show the deployment that fits the systems you already run.

Prefer to talk first? Contact the team.