For Legal Ops, Compliance, and Microsoft 365 teams, legal holds rarely arrive neatly packaged. They tend to start with a demand letter, a regulatory inquiry, or a late afternoon call from outside counsel that immediately puts the organization on the clock.
What follows is familiar: Urgent questions about custodians, data locations, and risk, often asked before anyone has had time to slow down and assess what’s really required.
At first glance, implementing a legal hold seems straightforward. Identify custodians, apply the hold in Microsoft 365, and move on. But experienced teams know that this initial setup is only the beginning. In modern collaboration environments, people change roles, accounts are disabled or deleted, data moves, and context erodes quietly over time. The organizations that struggle with legal holds aren’t failing because they didn’t turn them on. They are fail because the hold couldn’t withstand everything that happened afterward.
Understanding the key steps involved in implementing a defensible legal hold means looking beyond the checkbox and treating preservation as a process that must hold up under longterm scrutiny.
Every legal hold begins with urgency, but rarely with clarity. On day one, the team will ask itself the same questions. Who are the real custodians? What data actually exists? What happens if someone leaves while this hold is active?
In Microsoft 365, custodians are not static. Mailboxes are converted, deleted, or reassigned. User identities change as employees leave, merge roles, or move between systems. When organizations treat a legal hold as a single technical action instead of a living process, they assume stability where none exists.
This is where many holds become fragile from the start. The hold may be technically enabled, but it’s already exposed to risk if custodian identification is incomplete or poorly documented. A defensible legal hold starts by acknowledging that preservation must survive change, not assume it won’t happen.
There is a common belief that once a legal hold is enabled, data is effectively “locked” and safe, but in Microsoft Purview that belief is dangerously incomplete.
A legal hold preserves data containers tied to specific identities at a specific point in time, which creates several critical limitations:
These limitations become more serious as time passes. When a custodian leaves the organization or their account changes, Purview can retain data — but it cannot explain the decisions behind preservation. Legacy legal hold workflows were designed for a world where custodians stayed put and data lived in predictable places, assumptions that modern collaboration has fundamentally broken.
Most legal holds don’t fail because data was deleted; they fail because no one can later explain why preservation decisions were made.
Legal holds are not shortlived. Some last months. Others last years. And the risk associated with them increases over time.
When holds quietly degrade, the consequences are very real. Missed custodians, lost context, or gaps in preservation don’t get blamed on tooling, they get blamed on people. Legal Ops, Compliance, and IT leaders are expected to explain what happened, often under pressure from courts or regulators.
Operationally, the cost escalates quickly. Teams scramble to reconstruct decisions using emails, spreadsheets, and faded memories. Outside counsel becomes involved. Billable hours rise. To avoid future risk, organizations often swing toward overcollection. Placing more custodians on hold than necessary, retaining more data than required, and creating downstream review costs that far exceed the original preservation effort.
What began as a compliance requirement becomes a longterm operational and financial drain.
Most legal holds don’t unravel during setup. Most legal holds unravel later, when someone asks a question the organization can’t confidently answer.
That moment of scrutiny usually centers on a small set of uncomfortable questions:
In too many cases, there is no defensible trail. Legal Ops assumed IT had handled it, IT has no record beyond a technical setting, and Microsoft 365 shows that a hold existed but not the reasoning behind it. At that point, the organization isn’t defending a process — it’s defending assumptions.
A defensible legal hold must be designed with this moment in mind, not treated as an afterthought.
Organizations that succeed take a fundamentally different approach. They treat legal holds as a lifecycle that must remain defensible from start to finish.
That shift changes everything. Preservation is no longer reactive. Custodian decisions are intentional and documented. Changes over time are tracked, not rediscovered under pressure. Legal Ops can confidently explain who was on hold, when they were placed there, and why.
For IT, this removes the constant anxiety of silent failure. A request comes in. A custodian is placed on hold. And the team can move on knowing the action is documented, auditable, and defensible months or years later. Without relying on side spreadsheets or tribal knowledge.
When preservation is designed for endurance, legal holds become repeatable and controlled instead of stressful and fragile.
Microsoft Purview is a powerful foundation for preservation, but it was never designed to manage the operational realities of legal holds over time. It applies retention but it does not manage custodian context, intent, or defensibility.
That is exactly where CaseFusion Legal Hold fits.
CaseFusion Legal Hold was built to complement Purview, not replace it. Instead of treating custodians as static accounts, it preserves custodian context, capturing who was placed on hold, when the decision was made, and why it mattered to the case. Custodian interviews add clarity and intent, eliminating guesswork months or years later.
Every action is auditable. Every change is tracked. When custodians leave, roles change, or matters evolve, defensibility doesn’t quietly erode in the background. Legal holds are monitored, maintained, and documented as a true lifecycle.
For Legal Ops and IT teams, this turns legal holds into an operationally simple, repeatable process. A request comes in. A custodian is placed on hold. Context, auditability, and defensibility are handled automatically. So teams can move on with confidence.
CaseFusion Legal Hold is available with unlimited legal holds for $1.50 per user, with a 3,000 User minimum. To accelerate adoption, Cloudficient also offers a Get Started Services Package to help organizations implement a defensible legal hold process quickly and correctly.
If your organization relies on Microsoft 365 and needs legal holds that will stand up when they are finally scrutinized, now is the time to rethink preservation.
Talk to us about your potential CaseFusion Legal Hold needs and build defensibility into your legal hold process from day one.
What is the most common reason legal holds fail?
Legal holds most often fail due to missed or poorly documented custodians, not because data was intentionally deleted. When organizations cannot explain why preservation decisions were made, defensibility breaks down under scrutiny.
Does Microsoft Purview provide everything needed for defensible legal holds?
Microsoft Purview preserves data, but it does not preserve custodian context, intent, or decision rationale. Those operational gaps become critical when legal holds last months or years.
How long should a legal hold remain in place?
A legal hold should remain active for as long as the legal or regulatory obligation exists. Because many holds extend for years, they must be managed as an ongoing lifecycle, not a temporary setting.
What happens when an employee on legal hold leaves the organization?
Without proper lifecycle management, custodian context and documentation can be lost when an employee leaves. Solutions like CaseFusion Legal Hold preserve that context so defensibility does not erode over time.
How does CaseFusion Legal Hold work with Microsoft Purview?
CaseFusion Legal Hold complements Purview by adding custodian tracking, documentation, monitoring, and auditability. Purview applies the retention, while CaseFusion ensures the legal hold remains defensible end to end.