Litigation hold notice: what it must say and who has to confirm it

A litigation hold notice is the communication that tells specific people to preserve information relating to a matter. It is the operative document of a legal hold: the duty exists whether or not a notice is sent, but the notice is how the organisation discharges it and, later, how it demonstrates that it did.

That evidential role determines how it should be written. It is read twice — once by a custodian who wants to know what to do, and once, possibly years later, by somebody assessing whether the organisation acted reasonably. Those two readers want different things, and a notice that serves only the first tends to fail the second.

What a litigation hold notice must contain

• A plain statement that a legal matter exists and that preservation is required, without necessarily disclosing the details.
• The subject matter and date range, specifically enough that a custodian can tell what is covered.
• Categories of information: email, chat messages, documents, notes, calendars, texts on personal devices where relevant, physical files, photographs.
• An explicit instruction to stop deleting, including emptying deleted items and archiving that removes material.
• What not to do: no editing, no back-dating, no "cleaning up" files before preserving them.
• Who to contact with questions, and an instruction not to discuss the matter more widely.
• A requirement to acknowledge receipt, with a deadline.

Acknowledgement is the part that gets skipped

A notice sent to a distribution list, unacknowledged, proves that an email was sent. A notice acknowledged by each named custodian proves that each of them received and understood it. Track the acknowledgements, chase the ones outstanding, and record what you did about people who never responded — that record is what turns a gap into a documented follow-up rather than an unexplained silence.

Reissue periodically. Matters run for years, people join and leave the relevant teams, and a notice sent once at the start has decayed by the time discovery begins. A short reminder at intervals, with a fresh acknowledgement, is far easier to defend than a single notice from three years ago.

Write it for someone who is not a lawyer

Custodians are usually not legal staff, and a notice written in the register of a court filing gets skimmed. Say what the matter is about in ordinary words, say precisely what to keep, and say what to stop doing. Where a system deletes automatically, tell them it is being handled centrally rather than leaving them to worry about something they cannot control. Clarity is not just courtesy — a custodian who misunderstands the scope preserves the wrong things.

Keep the versions and the list

What matters afterwards is the whole set: the notice as issued, the custodian list as at each issue, the acknowledgements, the reminders and the release. Ettex Docs holds the notice with version history so each reissue is traceable, Ettex Records keeps the acknowledgements and custodian lists per matter, and the wider obligation it implements sits alongside the records retention schedule it suspends.

Plainly: this is documents and records, not legal advice or an eDiscovery product. The content and scope of a notice are matters for counsel; what this covers is issuing it in a way that can be shown to have worked.