Litigation hold

The hold is the operational answer to the preservation duty: identify likely custodians and data sources, suspend auto-deletion for them, notify people in writing, and monitor compliance. Its outbound cousin is the preservation letter — the demand sent to an opponent or third party putting them on notice to preserve, and laying the foundation for later spoliation arguments if they don’t.

Why it matters in practice

Timing and scope are where holds are attacked. The duty attaches at reasonable anticipation — which can be the incident itself, the demand letter, or the internal email saying “we should loop in legal” — and a hold issued months late leaves a gap the other side will reconstruct. Scope failures are quieter: the hold that covered email but not text messages, the custodian nobody identified, the SaaS system whose retention nobody changed. Courts judge these efforts on reasonableness and documentation, which makes the hold’s paper trail — when issued, to whom, covering what, with what follow-up — evidence in its own right.

For the requesting party, “when did the duty attach and what did the hold cover” is a standard 30(b)(6) deposition topic.

In the fact record

Hold effectiveness is ultimately tested against the production: quiet custodians, thin months, and referenced-but-missing documents are how gaps become motions. Coverage analysis finds them while the meet-and-confer can still fix it.