When a trial, product, etc. enters litigation, it may be necessary to preserve or audit any changes made to related documents. Users can apply a “legal hold” to documents by relating them to a Legal Hold object record. When a document is under legal hold, Vault preserves the document but allows business processes to continue.
With this feature, you can use Vault to:
- Create legal hold object records and manage those object records with lifecycles.
- Use fields on the Legal Hold object to define the scope of a legal hold, for example, all documents where Product includes CholeCap and Country includes United States.
- Apply an approved legal hold to documents that fall within the legal hold scope, either automatically or manually.
- Preserve documents under legal hold by preventing deletion, yet allowing documents to continue on in their lifecycles.
- Easily export document audit trail information related to the legal hold.
Documents Under Legal Hold
When a legal hold is applied, Vault will:
- “Preserve” all documents within the defined scope. For constraints on preserved documents.
- Ensure future documents within the scope also become preserved.
- Allow continued versioning, changes to document field values, workflow activities, and lifecycle changes. Vault tracks all activity in the Document Audit History.
Preserved Document Constraints
When a document is under legal hold, the system prohibits several actions:
- Users cannot delete any version of the document, including versions created after applying the legal hold. Delete will not be available in the All Actions menu for any document under legal hold, except to users with Power Delete permission if the related legal hold is in Lifted status.
- Users cannot alter content of the preserved version.
- Users cannot edit or delete existing annotations.
- Users cannot delete renditions.
- Users cannot reclassify documents.
- In lifecycles where state entry actions automatically delete minor versions of a document, the state change will go through, but Vault will not delete the document versions.
Configuration Elements
Legal Hold is a standard object that Admins can customize to include specific fields to scope individual legal holds. Vault uses those fields and their values on the object record to find matching documents, which are documents that fall within the scope of the legal hold. For each new legal hold, a Legal User must create a new Legal Hold object record and initiate the standard object lifecycle for approval and application.
Legal Hold Object Lifecycle
Vault includes a standard object lifecycle for legal holds. Admins can customize the lifecycle, but it must contain Approved, Lifted, and Inactive states.
When the Legal Hold record is in a state other than Approved and Lifted:
- Users and Vault cannot add or remove documents from the legal hold.
When the Legal Hold record is in Approved state:
- Users and Vault can add documents to the legal hold.
- Users and Vault can remove documents from the legal hold.
- Users and Vault cannot change the scope of the legal hold.
When the Legal Hold record is in Lifted state:
- Users and Vault cannot change the scope of the legal hold.
- Users and Vault cannot add or remove documents from the legal hold.
- Only users with the Power Delete permission can delete documents.
Note: When a document that belongs to a lifted legal hold is deleted, Vault automatically populates the Document Name and Document Version fields on the related legal hold item.
Legal Hold Auditing
Document Auditing
Select View Related Document Audit History from a legal hold object record’s All Actions menu. This action presents the standard Document Audit History, prefiltered to show only document actions that:
- Occurred on documents related to the legal hold
- Occurred after the legal hold was applied to the document
Object Record Auditing
Vault will create audit entries in the Object Record Audit History for the following actions related to legal hold:
- Universally apply legal hold
- Legal hold lifecycle state changes
- Add documents to the legal hold
- Remove documents from the legal hold
- Bulk add documents to the legal hold
- Bulk remove documents from the legal hold
Related Permissions
| Type | Permission Label | Controls |
| Security Profile | Object: Legal Hold | Ability to read, create, edit, and delete records in the Legal Hold object. |
| Security Profile | Application: Legal Hold: Apply | Ability to apply a legal hold. |
| Security Profile | Application: Legal Hold: Remove | Ability to remove a legal hold. |
| Document Role | View Document | Ability to view the document; you must have this permission to apply or remove a legal hold from a document. |