Enterprise orgs require a robust system in place to ensure that they can identify, preserve, and produce relevant information when needed. Legal holds (in conjunction with eDiscovery) are a key component of this system. With this legal hold feature, Enterprise org admins can place a user under hold and preserve all the docs they own and docs they have edited until the hold is released.

📣 The legal hold feature is a paid add-on, available to customers on our Enterprise tier. To get access to this feature, please contact your account team. If you don't yet have an account team, you can reach out to us via this form.

Initiate a legal hold

Org admins on Coda’s Enterprise plan can start a legal hold by following these steps:

Go to coda.io/docs
Click on More options in the lower left corner, then select [org name] organization settings
Click into the Data governance tab
Click on the Create new hold button
Then fill in the available fields, including...
1. Name: A name for the hold
2. Description: Description of the hold
3. Users: Search for and select one or more users, using their emails
4. Time period: We will hold any docs created by or edited by the user(s) during this time period. You’re required to choose a start date, but end date is optional and will default to “ongoing.”

View and export preserved docs

As part of the legal hold, org admins can preserve docs owned by and edited by the user from your given time period. This means that the docs will remain in our system, even if the user deletes them. Org admins have full access to view and export the contents of all the preserved docs.

Once the legal hold is created, simply follow these steps to view or export the preserved docs:

Under the Data governance tab, simply click on the hold name. This will open a list of all preserved docs for this hold.
To view any specific doc, just click on the doc name in the list.
To export docs, you can either...
1. use the checkboxes to select specific docs, then click Export X docs
2. click the Export all docs on hold button to export all preserved docs
Then choose which version of the doc(s) to export: the version available as of today, or the version from a specific date in the past.
Hit Create to generate the export. This may take a few minutes, depending on the size of the export.
Once the export is created, you can find it in the Exports for this hold tab, and hit the Download button.
1. It will download as a zip file in your browser. The zip file will contain all the docs in .pdf format, along with a .csv manifest which shows a list of docs that were included in the download and other useful metadata.

Track and manage legal holds

You can view, edit, and delete your legal holds from the legal holds dashboard, under the Data governance tab of your Organization settings. Simply click on the three-dot menu to the right of each hold to open up the action menu.

FAQs

Will a user be alerted when a legal hold is placed on their docs?

No, the user will not be notified. Only the org admins will be able to view the legal hold.

What happens if a user tries to delete a doc that’s under a legal hold?

The doc will appear as deleted to the user, but it will remain in our system - accessible by org admins - as long as the legal hold is active.

How do I get access to the legal hold feature?

This feature is available to admins on Coda’s Enterprise plan as a paid add-on. If you’re already on the Enterprise plan, please contact your account team to get started. If you’re not yet on an Enterprise plan, you can reach out to our Sales team here.