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A legal hold is a process that an enterprise can use to preserve all forms of potentially relevant information when litigation is pending or reasonably anticipated. Applying a hold to items prevents any user from deleting them from Box. Legal Holds can be managed and assigned to folders and files through the Box APIs.
Legal Holds are a feature of the Box Governance package, which can be added on to any Business Plus, Enterprise Advanced or Enterprise account.

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Policies, Assignments, and Holds

Working with Legal Hold Policies requires a developer to work with three distinct resources.
  • Policies: A Legal Hold Policy describes the general behavior of the hold. It determines which files should be affected, based on the date and time the files were created or updated.
  • Assignments: A Legal Hold Policy Assignment is a relation between a policy and custodian. In this case, as custodian can be a user, folder, file, or file version. Creating an assignment puts a hold on all the file versions that belong to the custodian. For example, if an assignment is created on a folder the policy is applied to all file versions within that folder.
  • Holds: A File Version Legal Hold represents all the policies that are assigned to a specific file version. Note that every file version can have a maximum of one file version legal hold and this hold contains a list of every assigned policy.

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Example Use Case

If an order of discovery is received or the customer is part of an ongoing litigation, a legal hold policy can be created to keep track of everything that needs to be held. The actual holding is done by assigning a policy to a specific files or folder. When the holds are no longer needed, the policy can be released by deleting the assignment.

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Required Scopes

Before using any of the Legal Hold APIs, an application must have the GCM and Manage Legal Hold scopes enabled. These are not available in the Developer Console and need to instead be enabled by contacting customer support.