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Legal Holds: Keep Customer and Team Records During a Dispute

A legal hold stops a customer's or team member's records from being deleted while a claim, a dispute or a lawyer's request is open. While the hold is in force, deletions that would remove their records wait instead of running. Nothing is deleted when you release the hold: you decide what happens to each waiting deletion.

Enterprise plan, Owners only

Legal holds are part of the Enterprise plan, and only the account Owner can place, extend or release them. On another plan, the Legal Holds tab shows an upgrade prompt instead.

Before you start

Every change to a hold is confirmed with your passkey. If you don't have one yet, add it under Profile → Security → Passkeys first. Legal holds can't be managed from the mobile app.

Place a hold

  1. Open Settings → Legal Holds.
  2. Select Place hold.
  3. Under Who to hold, choose A customer or A team member, then type a name or number and pick the person from the list. Only your own company's customers and team members appear.
  4. Enter a Matter reference (for example your lawyer's case number) and a Reason.
  5. Check the Review by date. It defaults to 90 days from today.
  6. Tick Confidential if the person must not be told that their deletion is delayed.
  7. Select Place hold with passkey and confirm with your passkey.

The hold appears under Holds in force with its status and a "due in" badge for the review date.

Review or extend a hold

A hold stays in force until you release it. When its review date comes round, its status changes to Review due. To keep it, select Extend, choose a new review date and confirm with your passkey.

Release a hold

  1. Select Release on the hold.
  2. The dialog tells you how many deletions this hold delayed.
  3. Enter a reason for releasing and confirm with your passkey.

Decide on waiting deletions

After you release a hold, every deletion it delayed is listed under Deletions waiting for your decision. Nothing runs on its own.

  • Delete runs the deletion now, where it can be confirmed from this page.
  • Keep data cancels the deletion with a reason, and the records are kept.

Each decision is confirmed with your passkey.

What you won't see here

Holds that FSM Navigator places, for example to answer a legal demand, are not shown on this tab and can't be released from it.