Govern · Matters & Holds

A hold is a description, not a list

Holds are stored as predicates — custodians, dates, terms — so material arriving next month is preserved without reapplying anything. Notices go out, custodians acknowledge for themselves, reminders escalate, and release takes two people.

Grotabyte — Matters & Holds · Hendricks v. Acme

Hold notice · custodian acknowledgment

acknowledged11 of 14

Hold predicatestanding

custodians · 2019 → present — material arriving next month is covered too

Self-attestation2 reminders sent

each custodian acknowledges their own notice — nobody attests for them1 escalated

Release requires a second approver · refused erasures ledgered with the legal basis

Where it starts

Litigation is reasonably anticipated. Opening the matter is the container; preservation is a separate, deliberate step — adding a custodian to a matter does not hold their mail, and closing a matter does not release its holds. Both would be wrong as a side effect of editing a form.

How it runs

01
Open the matter, then place the hold
The hold is a predicate: custodians (blank means everyone), a date range, optional terms. Click it afterwards and see what it actually preserves, evaluated against the archive as it stands today.
02
Get told when the scope is everything
A hold with no scope preserves the whole archive, and the product says so in numbers — 'all 691,036 documents, plus everything archived from now on' — then creates it anyway. Refusing would be wrong; unwarned would be worse.
03
Issue notices; custodians answer for themselves
Acknowledgment is self-attestation, recorded with method and timestamp under the custodian's own identity — nobody attests for them. A custodian's whole view of the product is one screen: their notices, and an Acknowledge button.
04
Chase with a cadence, not a memory
Reminders at 3, 7 and 14 days; unacknowledged notices escalate to a manager after 14. A departed custodian stops the chasing — their material stays, and the hold still reaches it.
05
Release under dual control, into a grace period
Release requires a second approver, and released material enters a 30-day grace period before becoming disposition-eligible — so the nightly sweep cannot destroy a decade of mail the same night litigation ends.

Why it holds up

A hold captured as a list of ids at placement would miss everything that arrives afterwards — the classic under-preservation failure. A predicate cannot.

The scope count is taken strictly before the hold persists: a predicate that cannot evaluate raises an error, because '0 documents' is indistinguishable from a scope that matched nothing.

Sweep exemptions are ledgered per hold — the entries that prove preservation worked, queryable per matter.

Notices are recorded before the transport is attempted: a notice that failed to send is a fact on the record, not a silence.

Refused erasure requests under hold are ledgered with the legal basis — the entry a regulator actually wants to see.

What you hand the regulator

A workflow that ends on a screen isn’t finished. This one ends in a document.

The hold report

Per matter: who was told, when, who acknowledged and how, who was chased and how many times — closed by an attestation tying every acknowledgment to the tamper-evident ledger.

notices issued · custodians notified · acknowledged · outstanding · rate
per custodian: issued at · acknowledged at · method · reminders · escalated
attestation: each acknowledgment recorded in the hash-chained ledger

Adjacent workflows

Retention & Certified Destruction Chain of Custody & Audit Privilege & Redaction

See it run on your data scenario

The demo form asks which workflows you want to see — name this one and we’ll stage it.

Book a Demo All workflows

How it runs

Open the matter, then place the hold

The hold is a predicate: custodians (blank means everyone), a date range, optional terms. Click it afterwards and see what it actually preserves, evaluated against the archive as it stands today.

Get told when the scope is everything

A hold with no scope preserves the whole archive, and the product says so in numbers — 'all 691,036 documents, plus everything archived from now on' — then creates it anyway. Refusing would be wrong; unwarned would be worse.

Issue notices; custodians answer for themselves

Acknowledgment is self-attestation, recorded with method and timestamp under the custodian's own identity — nobody attests for them. A custodian's whole view of the product is one screen: their notices, and an Acknowledge button.

Chase with a cadence, not a memory

Reminders at 3, 7 and 14 days; unacknowledged notices escalate to a manager after 14. A departed custodian stops the chasing — their material stays, and the hold still reaches it.

Release under dual control, into a grace period

Release requires a second approver, and released material enters a 30-day grace period before becoming disposition-eligible — so the nightly sweep cannot destroy a decade of mail the same night litigation ends.