What is a Legal Hold?

A "legal hold" is an affirmative act by an organization to prevent the destruction of documents, including physical documents such as paper, as well as electronically stored information (commonly referred to as ESI) relevant to a lawsuit or governmental investigation. Practitioners and courts refer to this concept as a legal hold or alternatively as a record hold, document hold, data hold, disposition hold, litigation hold, regulatory hold, hold order, audit hold or preservation order. While an organization is free to preserve documents in any manner that it sees fit, some cases have held that a company is required to implement a legal hold. In one case, plaintiff was allowed to amend its complaint to add a separate spoliation cause of action, simply because defendant "failed to implement a [legal] hold to prevent the destruction of evidence after the complaint was filed...." Ed Schmidt Pontiac-GMC Truck, Inc. v. DaimlerChrysler Motors Company, LLC, 2008 WL 668267 (N.D. Ohio, Mar. 11, 2008). See also The Sedona Conference® Commentary on Legal Holds, (August 2007 Public Comment Version).