Arlington, Virginia · Washington DC, Maryland & Nationwide
Pro-Legal Services, Inc. provides litigation hold services, preservation support, and forensic data collection for law firms, corporate legal departments, and government agencies. Preservation failures rarely announce themselves. They surface months later, when a custodian is deposed or a production has a gap nobody can explain, and by then the question is not what was lost but what the loss looks like to a court.
1. The notice went out and nothing else happened
A hold notice is a communication, not a control. If auto-delete policies keep running, mailboxes keep purging, and departing employees keep having their accounts deprovisioned on the usual schedule, the notice documents an intention rather than a preservation.
2. Nobody suspended the retention policy
Mail retention, chat retention, and backup rotation operate on timers set long before the matter existed. Suspending them is an IT action with an owner and a date, and it is the step most often assumed to have happened because somebody sent an email about it.
3. The hold list and the custodian list drifted apart
Custodians get added as the matter develops, and the hold list does not always follow. People also leave. A hold that was complete in month one is routinely incomplete by month six, which is why a periodic reconciliation beats a single issuance.
4. Chat and short-message data were never in scope
Teams, Slack, and mobile messaging carry substantive communication and live under their own retention settings. Holds drafted around email frequently do not reach them, and short-message data is the material most likely to be gone by the time anyone asks.
5. Cloud and SaaS sources were outside the picture
Microsoft Purview and Microsoft 365, SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Workspace, and the departmental SaaS tools nobody told legal about. Each has its own retention behavior, and each is a place where a hold stops at the boundary of what IT remembered to include.
6. Nobody can prove what was done
Compliance is the part that gets challenged. Who acknowledged the notice, when, what was suspended, by whom, and what reconciliation was performed. A preservation program with no contemporaneous record is one you will be reconstructing under pressure.
How We Support Preservation
We provide urgent forensic data collection and preservation across endpoints, mobile devices, email, Microsoft Purview and Microsoft 365, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Workspace, and Slack, under documented chain of custody with hash verification. Where preservation is uncertain, we collect defensively rather than waiting for a policy question to resolve — a targeted collection now costs a fraction of a spoliation argument later, and it is the one preservation decision that is never wrong in hindsight. Available 24/7/365 for urgent preservation.
Related reading: chain of custody for digital evidence covers where collections themselves fail, forensic data collection services covers the full source range, and subpoena response and emergency eDiscovery covers urgent matters.
We support preservation and urgent collection across Washington DC, Maryland, and Virginia, including Alexandria, Fairfax, Tysons, Northern Virginia, Richmond, Bethesda, Rockville, Silver Spring, Baltimore, and Annapolis, and for matters nationwide, including New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, Miami, and Wilmington.
Unsure whether a hold actually held? Contact Pro-Legal Services, Inc., 1550 Wilson Blvd, Suite 250, Arlington, VA 22209, at info@pro-legal.com or 202-955-9400. We will tell you what is still recoverable and what needs collecting now. Available 24/7/365.