Compliance
Legal hold, explained
A hold exists to stop routine processes from destroying evidence. Once a dispute is reasonably anticipated, continuing to delete on schedule can itself become the problem, independently of whatever the underlying dispute is about — which is why the hold has to be capable of overriding retention rather than competing with it.
A workable hold has three properties. It is scoped, applying to named people, rooms or date ranges rather than to everything. It is auditable, so that who applied it, when and why is recorded. And it is releasable, because a hold that nobody can lift quietly becomes an indefinite retention policy that no data protection assessment ever approved.
How Enclessa uses it
Enclessa supports legal hold in the People module and on knowledge-base spaces, where it exempts records from retention, and files kept for a statutory duty are held the same way. A platform-wide hold marker at channel and user level is on the roadmap and is not available today. In end-to-end encrypted rooms a hold can preserve ciphertext and nothing more, because Enclessa holds no key that opens it.