Know When to Hold Em: The Future of Legal Holds

In our last post, we discussed the steps needed to design and operationalize a legal hold workflow in today’s diverse data environment.

If the past two decades of eDiscovery have taught us anything, it’s that preservation practices evolve at the speed of data. What began as a relatively contained exercise – preserving emails and documents – has expanded into a complex, modern data challenge spanning cloud platforms, collaboration tools, mobile devices, structured databases, and now generative AI.

Looking ahead, the next wave of technological innovation will once again reshape how organizations approach legal holds. The duty to preserve will remain constant, but the tools, expectations, and risks associated with that duty will continue to evolve. The future of legal holds will be defined by automation, intelligence, integration, and an ever-expanding universe of data sources. In this last post in the series, we will discuss what we think the future of legal holds will look like.

From Reactive to Proactive Preservation

Historically, legal holds have been reactive. A triggering event occurs (i.e., litigation, an investigation, or some other dispute) and legal teams respond by identifying custodians and issuing hold notices. While this model still applies, the future is moving toward a more proactive preservation posture.

Organizations are increasingly investing in systems that continuously map data sources, monitor risk signals, and prepare for potential preservation scenarios before they arise. Instead of scrambling to understand where data lives after a trigger, legal teams will have real-time visibility into systems, custodians, and retention policies.

This shift is driven in part by the sheer speed of modern data creation. In environments where messages can be created and deleted in seconds, waiting to act is no longer viable. Proactive readiness – supported by data mapping, governance frameworks, and integrated systems – will become a defining feature of defensible preservation.

Automation as the Backbone of Legal Hold Workflows

Manual legal hold processes are already under strain, and that strain will only increase as data volumes grow. The future of legal holds will rely heavily on automation to ensure speed, consistency, and scalability. The future of the legal hold process will rely heavily on automation to ensure speed, consistency, and scalability.

Legal hold platforms are evolving beyond simple notification tools. They are becoming centralized hubs that:

• Automatically identify potential custodians based on organizational data
• Trigger holds based on predefined risk events
• Apply preservation controls directly within enterprise systems
• Track compliance in real time
• Generate audit-ready documentation

Automation reduces reliance on manual processes, which are often slow, error-prone, and difficult to scale. It also enhances defensibility by ensuring that preservation steps are applied consistently across matters and data sources.

As organizations adopt more integrated ecosystems, legal hold workflows will increasingly operate as part of a broader legal operations and information governance infrastructure, rather than as a standalone processes.

The Expanding Data Universe: More Sources, More Complexity

The future of legal holds will be shaped by the continued expansion of data sources. While email and documents remain important, they are no longer the primary focus. Instead, preservation efforts must account for a diverse and growing set of data types:

• Collaboration platforms with short-form, context-dependent messaging
• Mobile and wearable devices capturing real-time communications and activity
• Internet of Things (IoT) systems generating operational and environmental data
• Structured and semi-structured data from enterprise applications
• Virtual and augmented reality environments where interactions may be recorded
• Generative AI systems producing dynamic, machine-generated content

Each of these sources introduces unique preservation challenges. Some data is ephemeral by design. Some data is distributed across jurisdictions. Some data is continuously updated or overwritten. All of it is less document-oriented, giving way to a broader understanding of evidence as streams of activity and interaction. Legal data intelligence is vital to meeting tomorrow’s data preservation needs.

Legal teams will need to develop a deeper technical understanding of how these systems work – and how to preserve data within them – if they are to meet future obligations.

Generative AI and the Question of What to Preserve

Among emerging technologies, generative AI presents one of the most significant and least understood preservation challenges. As organizations increasingly rely on AI tools to generate content, summarize information, and support decision-making, questions arise about what constitutes the record.

Is it the final output? The prompt that generated it? The underlying data used by the model? Or all of the above?

The answers will likely vary depending on the context of the dispute and preservation practices may need to adapt to account for:

• AI-generated drafts and communications
• Prompt histories and interaction logs
• System-level metadata and configurations
• The integration of AI outputs into other systems (e.g., emails, documents, reports)

Forward-looking organizations are already incorporating AI governance into their preservation frameworks, tackling the issues related to identifying, tracing, and retaining AI-related data.

As courts and regulators begin to grapple with these issues, expectations around AI-related preservation will become more defined and likely more demanding.

Short-Form and Ephemeral Communication: A Continuing Challenge

The rise of short-form messaging and ephemeral communication has already shaped preservation practices and it will continue to do so. Collaboration tools and messaging apps increasingly favor speed and informality, often at the expense of permanence.

Future preservation strategies will need to account for:

• Messages that exist only briefly before deletion
• Context-dependent communications that require thread-level preservation
• Reactions, edits, and metadata that provide meaning beyond the text itself

Technology will play a key role in addressing these challenges. Platform-native preservation tools, API integrations, and advanced capture mechanisms will help organizations retain relevant communications without disrupting user experience.

At the same time, organizations will need to revisit retention policies and user behaviors, ensuring that ephemeral communication practices do not conflict with preservation obligations.

Integration Across Systems: Breaking Down Silos

One of the most important developments in the future of legal holds will be greater integration across systems. Today, preservation often requires coordination across multiple tools and teams, including legal hold platforms, enterprise applications, mobile systems, and IT infrastructure.

In the future, these systems will be more tightly connected. Legal hold actions will trigger preservation controls across multiple platforms simultaneously. Custodian data will sync with HR systems. Retention policies will dynamically adjust based on legal hold status.

This level of integration will reduce friction, improve accuracy, and enhance visibility. It will also allow legal teams to manage preservation holistically, rather than system by system.

Defensibility in an AI-Driven World

As technology evolves, so too will expectations around defensibility. Courts and regulators will continue to focus on whether organizations took reasonable, good-faith steps to preserve relevant information. But what constitutes “reasonable” will evolve alongside technology.

In an AI-driven, highly automated environment, organizations may be expected to:

• Leverage available technology to identify and preserve data
• Demonstrate understanding of their data ecosystems
• Provide detailed audit trails of preservation actions
• Validate that preservation controls are functioning as intended

Defensibility will increasingly depend not just on process, but on technical competence and system-level transparency.

Conclusion

The future of legal holds will not be defined by a single technology or trend, but by the convergence of many. Automation, AI, expanding data sources, and system integration will all play a role in shaping how organizations meet their preservation obligations.

It will also be based on the fundamentals and best practices we’ve learned over two decades of eDiscovery to date, including understanding the basics of ESI preservation, how the Federal rules define when “duty to preserve” begins, how preservation has evolved over time, best practices for communicating the legal hold, how to avoid common preservation pitfalls, case law trends regarding ESI preservation, addressing unique considerations for preservation across data sources, ensuring defensible deletion without leading to over-preservation, supporting the need for legal holds in regulatory investigations, and building a defensible legal hold process that is designed to support today’s needs and those defined by the future of legal holds.

For more regarding Cimplifi eDiscovery, litigation, and investigations capabilities, click here.