> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://developer.box.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Legal Holds

export const Link = ({href, children, className, ...props}) => {
  const localizedHref = href;
  return <a href={localizedHref} className={className} {...props}>
      {children}
    </a>;
};

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.

<Info>
  Legal Holds are a feature of the [Box Governance][governance] package, which
  can be added on to any Business Plus, Enterprise Advanced or Enterprise account.
</Info>

## Policies, Assignments, and Holds

Working with Legal Hold Policies requires a developer to work with three
distinct resources.

* **Policies:**  A <Link href="/reference/resources/legal-hold-policy">Legal Hold Policy</Link> 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 <Link href="/reference/resources/legal-hold-policy-assignment">Legal Hold Policy Assignment</Link> 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 <Link href="/reference/resources/file-version-legal-hold">File Version Legal Hold</Link> 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.

## 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.

## Required Scopes

Before using any of the Legal Hold APIs, an application must have the <Link href="/guides/api-calls/permissions-and-errors/scopes">GCM and
Manage Legal Hold scopes</Link> enabled. These are not available in the
Developer Console and need to instead be enabled by contacting customer
support.

[governance]: https://www.box.com/security/governance-and-compliance