Set a retention schedule and apply a legal hold

Before you begin

Know which retention obligations actually apply to you. Federal contract records, certified payroll, safety and OSHA logs, and tax records each carry their own statutory periods, and they're longer than most companies assume. Have counsel confirm the periods before you configure them, because a retention policy that disposes of a record early is worse than having no policy at all.

Steps

1. Go to Compliance → Records Retention → Policies.
2. Create a policy per record category (project documents, payroll, safety, contracts, financial records). Each policy needs a retention period, a trigger event that starts the clock (project closeout, fiscal year end, employee separation), and the citation for the requirement it implements.
3. Assign record categories to policies. Records inherit the policy's schedule from the moment they're created, so a document filed today already has a computed disposition date.
4. Review the disposition queue on a regular cycle. Records reaching their disposition date land in the queue for review rather than being deleted automatically.
5. When litigation is filed or reasonably anticipated, go to Compliance → Legal Hold → New Hold.
6. Scope the hold: by project, by record category, by date range, or by custodian. Scope it broadly at first, since narrowing a hold later is straightforward and missing records is not.
7. Issue the hold. Held records are blocked from disposition even where the retention policy says the period has expired, and the block persists until the hold is explicitly released.
8. Release the hold only when the matter is closed and counsel confirms it. Released records return to their normal retention schedule and rejoin the disposition queue if their period has already run.

What happens next

Retention runs on its own once the policies are in place, and the disposition queue becomes a periodic review rather than a project. The legal hold is the part that matters under pressure: an opposing party's preservation letter has a date on it, and being able to show a hold issued against a defined scope on a specific date is materially different from asserting that nothing was deleted.

Where the record lives

Policies, their citations, and every disposition action are retained under Compliance → Records Retention. Legal holds are retained under Compliance → Legal Hold with their scope, the date issued, who issued them, and the date released. The hold record survives the release, so the fact that a hold was in place during a given period is provable afterward.

Troubleshooting

A record won't dispose even though its period expired: a legal hold is almost always the cause, and that's the hold working correctly. Check the record's hold status before assuming the policy is misconfigured.

Records created before the policy existed have no disposition date: apply the policy to the existing category and let it compute against each record's own trigger event rather than backfilling dates by hand.

Not sure whether a hold should cover a project: issue it. An over-broad hold costs storage; a hold that missed relevant records costs considerably more, and the decision to exclude something is the one you have to defend.