Legal: Litigation Holds and Discovery
When litigation is anticipated, the duty to preserve attaches. Papyrus makes hold management and discovery production a few clicks rather than a panic.
Legal: Litigation Holds and Discovery
The duty to preserve evidence — once litigation is reasonably anticipated — is one of the few legal obligations where failing the systems test can sink an otherwise strong case. Papyrus is built so that litigation hold is a procedural decision, not a technical scramble.
Placing a hold
From /compliance/litigation-holds, a privileged user can:
- Create a new hold record with case reference, scope, custodians, and date range
- Apply the hold to: specific documents, folders, workspaces, users, or by saved search
- Notify named custodians automatically (in-app + email)
- Lock those documents against deletion (regardless of retention policy)
A document under hold cannot be permanently deleted by any user, including Tenant Admins. The hold release is logged.
What gets preserved
Papyrus's preservation is built around hash-chained immutability:
- The document content itself
- All metadata (extracted and manual)
- All version history
- All audit log entries (creation, views, edits, shares)
- All comments and @mentions
- All workflow history (approvals, decisions, comments)
- All related documents (linked invoices, contracts, amendments)
Discovery production
When discovery time comes, Legal can:
- Run a saved-search query across the hold scope
- Review hits with the auditor / external counsel role
- Bulk-export with audit certificate (showing what was searched, when, by whom, what matched)
- Generate a privilege log for excluded items
- Produce TIFF/PDF deliverables in the required format
The audit certificate is hash-signed and cryptographically tied to the underlying audit log.
Defensible deletion after the hold
When the hold is released:
- The release is logged with the releasing user, timestamp, and rationale
- Documents revert to their normal retention policy
- Custodians are notified the hold has lifted
If the underlying retention has elapsed, the documents become eligible for disposition — through the normal review-and-approve workflow.
What Legal teams stop worrying about
- “Did anyone delete anything they shouldn't have?” — they couldn't
- “Can we reconstruct what we had on a given date?” — the audit log answers
- “Did our deletion of old records constitute spoliation?” — only if no hold was in place, and the audit log proves that
- “What did this user have access to?” — the permissions audit answers