Put a record under 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 rely on them, because a policy that disposes of a record early is worse than having no policy at all.

Understand the two mechanisms and how they interact. The retention schedule says how long a record must be kept and from what event. A legal hold suspends disposal entirely while a claim or investigation is live. Both must permit a disposal, and either can block it.

Steps

1. Go to Admin & Settings → Governance → Records Retention.
2. If the schedule table is empty, click Install the default schedule. That seeds the FAR 4.7 baseline rules. It's safe to run more than once — it won't duplicate what's already there.
3. Click Govern a record to put a specific record under a rule. The dialog, Put a record under a retention policy, asks for the record's type, the record itself, the project it belongs to, and which rule applies. Submit with Assign policy.
4. Start the clock. Use Start clock on the assignment row and record when the triggering event actually happened — project closeout, fiscal year end, separation. The dialog is titled Record when the triggering event happened for a reason: the clock runs from the real-world event, not from the day you got around to filing it. If you entered the wrong date, the same control reads Correct date.
5. Review the retention-period-elapsed list on a cycle. Records reaching the end of their period land there as candidates for review rather than being destroyed automatically.
6. Close out a disposal with Close out on the row. Record a disposition note and confirm with Mark disposed. If the mandated period is still running, the server refuses — the button doesn't let you talk your way past the schedule.
7. When litigation is filed or reasonably anticipated, go to Records & Capture → Legal Hold and choose Place hold. Scope it broadly at first: narrowing a hold later is straightforward and missing records is not.
8. Release the hold only when the matter is closed and counsel confirms it. Released records return to their normal schedule and rejoin the candidate list if their period has already run.

What happens next

Retention 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.

Two honest limits, both stated in the app itself. The elapsed-period list shows candidates only — a hold placed after that list was built isn't reflected in it, though the guard still refuses a disposal it covers, which is why you check Legal Hold before destroying anything. And neither mechanism can recover a record that was deleted before it was ever governed, nor constrain someone with direct database access.

Where the record lives

Assignments, trigger dates, and every disposal action are kept under Admin & Settings → Governance → Records Retention. Legal holds are kept under Records & Capture → 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 looks expired: either the clock was started from a later event date than you assumed, or a legal hold covers it. Both are the system working correctly. Check the trigger date on the assignment first, then Legal Hold.

Records created before you installed the schedule aren't governed: they aren't governed until someone assigns them. Use Govern a record and set the trigger date to the real event rather than backfilling a disposal date 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.