Legal Holds

This standard states how a legal hold is triggered, issued, carried out, and released. A legal hold is the instruction that stops routine record destruction when litigation is reasonably anticipated. It overrides Record Retention completely: every record within its scope is preserved, even if its retention period expired the day before. The duty to preserve arises when litigation is reasonably anticipated: not when a complaint is served.

Roles and duties

• The Managing Member issues and releases every legal hold, in writing. Authority for both decisions sits with that role; see Authority and Governance.
• The Legal function prepares the hold notice, confirms receipt from every custodian, keeps the hold register, and advises on scope.
• Each custodian: every member of staff, contractor, the Tax Preparer, and any vendor who holds Company data within the scope: preserves the records in their custody and complies with the duties below.

What triggers a hold

Any of the following, and the list is not closed

• A lawsuit is filed against the Company, or against a seller where the Platform's records are at issue.
• The Company receives a subpoena, a civil investigative demand, or a regulator's inquiry.
• A credible threat of litigation arrives: a demand letter, a letter from a lawyer, or a notice asking the Company to preserve its records.
• An incident occurs that foreseeably leads to litigation: a serious pet injury in connection with Platform-arranged services, a data breach with exposure, or major seller fraud.
• The Managing Member decides a hold is prudent.

Procedure: issuing the hold

1. The Managing Member issues the hold in writing. Email is acceptable; the notice must be express and must itself be preserved.
2. State what happened: the matter: lawsuit caption, subpoena, or incident: in one paragraph.
3. State what is preserved: the scope, specifically. "All records relating to seller X, listings Y, and the DMCA notice of a stated date" is a scope; "all relevant documents" is not.
4. State who is covered: every person and vendor with custody of records within the scope.
5. State what to do: preserve; do not delete; do not tidy up; do not auto-archive. Suspend any routine destruction that touches records within the scope.
6. State how long: until the hold is released in writing. A hold does not expire by silence.
7. Send the notice, confirm receipt from every custodian, and file the notice. The hold notice is itself a record, retained in the legal proceedings class under Record Retention.
8. Export or copy the records within the scope promptly. Live records change; a hold stops destruction, it does not freeze a database. A copy taken at issuance is the clean evidence of what existed.

Scope: what is preserved

Scope is set matter by matter. The classes usually included are

• The case file: DMCA notices and their cases (see DMCA Agent Process), enforcement records (violations and appeals), and the policy version in force at the time, from the version history described in Policy Publication and Version Control. This is why policy versions are never removed.
• Communications: support cases and messages with the parties involved, emails, and chat records.
• Transaction records: orders, payments, payouts, refunds, and chargebacks touching the matter.
• System records: relevant logs, the consent record if privacy is at issue, and agent action records if an AI tool is involved.
• The deployed code: if the dispute turns on what the site did (the checkout flow, the DMCA intake, the consent banner), preserve the code version as deployed, by a version tag or deployment record. "The code has changed since then" is not an answer to "what did it do on the date in question."

Custodian duties

For the whole life of the hold, each custodian shall

1. Delete nothing within the scope: including routine cleanup, inbox clearing, and reorganizing files.
2. Discuss the hold with no one outside the group the notice covers. The existence of a hold is sensitive.
3. Ask before acting on anything next to the scope. If a record might be within the scope, treat it as within the scope and ask the Legal function.

Procedure: releasing the hold

1. The Managing Member releases the hold in writing when the matter is resolved, the subpoena has been complied with, or the limitations period has run.
2. The release states its date and returns the retention schedule to normal operation for the records concerned.
3. Release does not retroactively authorize the destruction that was blocked during the hold. Each record's retention period resumes, and destruction requires its own decision under Record Retention.

Records created and where they are kept

This standard creates hold notices, custodian receipt confirmations, the hold register, copies of records taken at issuance, and release notices. The Legal function keeps them with the corporate records, in the legal proceedings class, for so long as the matter and any appeal period require.

Escalation

Any trigger event, any custodian who cannot comply, any discovery that records within a hold's scope have been deleted, and any legal process of any kind are escalated to the Legal function at legal@aapawz.com on the day they arise.

Review cadence

The Legal function reviews every open hold quarterly, at the review described in Compliance Calendar, confirms each hold is still required and correctly scoped, and reviews this standard once a year.