A legal hold is a situation wherein a business or organization makes changes to its method of records management in order to preserve information because of a pending litigation. In the digital age, it often involves the handling of business data across sophisticated IT architectures.

In addition to pending litigation, a legal hold may be put in place because of an audit and/or an investigation. This will affect corporate policy in a number of ways. For example, a legal hold will often change the rules on how data are backed up in a system, how tape vaults or other storage archives are maintained, and whether physical storage media are recycled. Changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in the United States address e-discovery or the discovery of digital information to bring local processes into the 21st century.