When to place a legal hold

Why any channel needs a legal hold mechanism at all

Whatever retention schedule a channel runs by default (see choosing a retention policy), automated deletion running unattended against a case under active or reasonably anticipated legal proceedings is a genuine problem, not just an inconvenience — it can mean destroying evidence a company is legally required to preserve. GDPR's own erasure right carries an explicit exemption for exactly this situation (Art. 17(3)(e): erasure doesn't apply "for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims"), and a legal hold is how that exemption gets exercised in practice, case by case, on top of whatever the normal schedule would otherwise do.

What a hold actually does — and doesn't do

A hold isn't the same as pausing a case. In Provoxis, placing one doesn't freeze the case's progress: it keeps moving through New → Investigating → FeedbackGiven → Closed exactly as it would otherwise, and the 7-day and 3-month clocks keep running regardless. What a hold actually does is narrower and more specific: while it's active, manual erasure of that report is blocked outright. That's the entire mechanism — it doesn't change who can see the case, how it's investigated, or when it can be closed. Any hold worth having should work the same way: a targeted override on deletion, not a general freeze on the case.

When to set one

Set a hold as soon as you reasonably anticipate needing to preserve a case's data beyond whatever its normal retention would otherwise allow — active litigation, a regulatory inquiry, or disciplinary proceedings that might run past the point the case would otherwise become eligible for purge. Don't wait for a formal request from counsel to set one if you can already see the need coming — a hold costs nothing to have in place and everything to be missing when a case turns out to matter later.

The mechanics: a reason in, a reason out

Whatever system tracks this, requiring a written reason to set a hold and a written reason to release it is what makes the hold defensible if it's ever questioned later — a hold nobody can explain is barely different from no hold at all. Provoxis enforces this structurally: setting a hold requires a reason (free text, not optional), captured in the audit trail alongside who set it and when; releasing one requires the same. A hold can't just quietly lapse — someone has to actively decide the need for it has passed, and say why.

Release it when the need has actually passed, not by default

A hold that stays active long after the reason for it has gone away undermines the credibility of the record rather than protecting anything — it starts to look like a default state instead of a deliberate one. Once the litigation, inquiry, or proceedings that justified the hold have concluded, release it, with a real reason, and let the case's underlying retention tier take over again. If a case in a "still under proceedings" retention tier is reopened and re-closed once those proceedings genuinely conclude, that's also the point to reassess which tier it actually belongs in going forward.

Erasure is blocked, not impossible

Manual erasure of a held report shouldn't be able to happen at all while the hold is active — no override, no exception. In Provoxis, the hold has to be explicitly released first, which is itself a logged action, so erasure can never be used to quietly work around a hold that's still in force.

Legal basis

• Art. 17(3)(e), GDPR — the erasure-right exemption for establishing, exercising, or defending legal claims, the basis for legal hold overriding automatic purge.