If your organization's data retention strategy feels less like a lifecycle and more like a digital storage unit, legal holds may be the culprit.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: legal holds are essential. They protect your organization from spoliation claims and ensure you can meet your discovery obligations. But when they're poorly managed, and let's be honest, they often are, they quietly sabotage everything your information governance program is trying to accomplish.

Where It Breaks

The problem starts with over-preservation. A matter closes, litigation settles, or a regulatory inquiry goes quiet, but the hold lives on. Perhaps no one remembered to release it. Maybe no one knows it exists anymore. Meanwhile, data that should have been disposed of years ago continues to pile up, accumulating storage costs and risk. It's the corporate equivalent of keeping every receipt “just in case,” resulting in years of accumulated data and a compliance headache.

Compounding the issue is a lack of centralized visibility. In many organizations, legal holds exist in silos, tracked on spreadsheets, buried in email threads, or locked in the institutional memory of whoever happened to be in the legal department at the time. Without a single source of truth, it becomes nearly impossible to answer basic questions: How many active holds do we have? What data is affected? When was the last time anyone reviewed them?

The downstream effects are significant. The Sedona Conference, a leading authority on e-discovery best practices, has long emphasized that defensible data disposition requires organizations to implement and follow retention policies consistently. But you cannot defensibly dispose of data if you don't know what's still under hold. The result is a kind of governance paralysis. Retention schedules exist on paper, but in practice nothing ever gets deleted.

How to Fix It

So how do you fix it? Start with regular hold audits. Build a quarterly or biannual cadence where legal and records management review active holds together, confirm their continued necessity, and release those that are no longer needed. Implement a centralized hold tracking system that provides visibility across the organization, not just within the legal department. And perhaps most importantly, foster genuine cross-functional communication. Legal, IT, records management, and business stakeholders all have a role to play in managing the data lifecycle. When they operate in isolation, legal holds often slip through the cracks.

Legal holds don't have to be the enemy of good information governance, but they do require active management, accountability, and collaboration. The goal isn't to avoid preservation; it's to preserve thoughtfully and release deliberately.