skills/legal-hold-planner/SKILL.md

---
name: legal-hold-planner
description: >-
  Plans defensible preservation and legal-hold measures for anticipated or active
  disputes, investigations, regulatory matters, or disclosure obligations. Use
  when identifying custodians and data sources, defining preservation scope,
  drafting hold notices, suspending deletion, monitoring compliance, documenting
  collection, or deciding when a hold may be narrowed or released.
---

# Legal Hold Planner

Build a proportionate, auditable preservation plan without deciding that every
potentially relevant item must be collected or produced.

## Intake

Obtain the jurisdiction and forum, trigger event and date, claims or issues,
parties, relevant period, known custodians, information systems, devices,
third-party repositories, routine deletion settings, existing holds, applicable
orders or protocols, responsible legal and IT personnel, and any cross-border,
employment, privacy, secrecy, privilege, or regulatory constraints.

Treat the preservation trigger, governing duties, scope, and release standard as
jurisdiction-specific. If an immediate deletion risk exists, lead with interim
steps that preserve material without altering or over-collecting it.

## Method

1. State the event that may trigger preservation, the decision owner, the date
   the duty may have arisen, and every legal or factual uncertainty.
2. Translate the live issues into a preservation scope covering subjects, date
   ranges, people, organisations, systems, locations, file types, communications,
   structured data, physical records, and ephemeral or automatically deleted data.
3. Build a custodian-and-source map. Distinguish possession, custody, control,
   technical access, ownership, and third-party control rather than treating them
   as interchangeable.
4. Identify routine deletion, rotation, overwriting, device replacement, account
   closure, auto-delete, backup expiry, and business processes that require a
   documented suspension or exception.
5. Draft clear notices stating purpose, scope, examples, prohibited actions,
   acknowledgement, questions, confidentiality, update duties, and contact point.
   Do not disclose privileged strategy unnecessarily.
6. Define acknowledgement, reminder, interview, escalation, departure, new-
   custodian, system-change, and compliance-check procedures with owners and dates.
7. Preserve provenance and integrity during collection. Record source, custodian,
   method, operator, date, time zone, filters, exceptions, hashes where suitable,
   chain of custody, and any transformation.
8. Reassess scope after pleadings, orders, interviews, settlements, or new facts.
   Record every expansion, narrowing, and release decision and its authority.
9. Plan release only after counsel confirms that relevant duties, appeals,
   investigations, contractual holds, and overlapping matters have ended.

## Output

Provide a trigger memorandum, issue-to-scope map, custodian-and-source register,
deletion-risk table, hold notice, acknowledgement and reminder plan, collection
and exception log, compliance dashboard, reassessment schedule, and release
checklist. Mark assumptions and unverified legal propositions conspicuously.

## Guardrails

Do not delete, alter, conceal, backdate, or selectively preserve evidence. Do not
promise that a hold creates privilege, suspend systems without authorised IT and
business review, or collect entire accounts merely because preservation is broad.
Escalate suspected spoliation, inaccessible encrypted data, departed custodians,
personal devices, sanctions exposure, or conflicts between preservation and law.