In a federal lawsuit between two health-tech companies, one side's workplace chat messages for about 32 months are gone. Its own retention settings deleted them, and those settings kept running after the company issued a written litigation hold, according to court filings from October 2026.

When did your team last check your chat tool's retention setting, and would your legal hold process stop it?

What the court filings say happened

The company's chat workspace deleted messages in public channels after 75 days, and messages in private channels and direct messages after 30 days. The company "does not dispute" that its messages from the period the court ordered produced "no longer exist," its lawyers wrote in an October 14 opposition brief.

According to the other side's October 5 motion, the company issued a written litigation hold around June 9, 2025. The deletion settings stayed on, so every message sent in the next eight months was deleted after the hold went out. The company's own filing says it "did not use" the chat tool's legal-hold feature.

The company also couldn't say when the 30- and 75-day settings were adopted or by whom, because "the workspace's audit logs retain only 31 days of history," the motion quotes it as saying. A sworn declaration from its CEO later said the settings were in place before the dispute began, to the best of the CEO's knowledge.

A second gap turned up while the company prepared its production: some employees "may have used a messaging application to communicate regarding their work," and those messages "were not retained." The court never ruled on the motion. The parties settled and filed a stipulation dismissing the case on October 16, so no sanctions were ordered.

Why a legal hold doesn't switch off auto-delete

A litigation hold tells people to keep what they have, while a retention setting keeps deleting on its timer, so someone has to change the setting or apply the tool's own hold feature before the hold covers chat.

The federal rules expect that step. The advisory committee's notes to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37 say that when a party has a duty to preserve, "intervention in the routine operation of an information system is one aspect of what is often called a 'litigation hold.'"

Rule 37(e) lets a court act when electronically stored information "is lost because a party failed to take reasonable steps to preserve it" and can't be replaced. A court can order measures to cure the harm to the other side, and if it finds intent to deprive, it can tell the jury to presume the lost messages were unfavorable or end the case.

Where HIPAA fits, and where it doesn't

HIPAA won't set your chat retention window for you. The Security Rule requires covered entities and business associates to keep the documentation of their security policies and procedures for six years from when it was created or last in effect, whichever is later, as HHS's summary of the Security Rule also explains.

How long to keep a direct message between two staff members is a records and litigation decision. Give that decision a named owner and a sign-off from legal and compliance, so the setting in the admin console matches a policy someone approved.

What to check in your own chat tools

The first four steps each match a gap in the filings:

  1. Find the retention setting for each type of conversation in every workspace, including public channels, private channels, and direct messages, and note who has the admin rights to change it.
  2. Check how long the admin audit log keeps history. If it's shorter than your retention window, export setting changes on a schedule so you can show when a setting changed and who changed it.
  3. Write the chat step into your hold process. When counsel issues a hold, someone with admin rights applies the tool's legal-hold feature or suspends deletion for the people named, and records the date.
  4. Ask which messaging apps your staff use for work on their phones, and whether disappearing messages are turned on. In the case, a second app was a separate loss.
  5. Put the retention window in your records policy, with an owner and a review date, so the next change is a decision someone signs off on.

Email is the easier half to get right

What failed in the case was a deletion timer that nobody suspended when the hold went out. Paubox Email Archiving, part of Paubox Email Suite Premium, automatically archives every inbound and outbound email for all your senders with no time limit, so the archive has no deletion timer to suspend.

Your team can search the archive by sender, recipient, subject, body, attachment, and type when a request comes in.

Go deeper: HIPAA compliant email and documenting emails for HIPAA compliance.