# eDiscovery and Legal Hold Operations
One-sentence definition: Operational process to preserve, collect, and produce electronically stored information (ESI) under legal hold.
## Key Facts
- Triggered by litigation/regulatory request; suspend normal retention/deletion.
- Notify custodians; track acknowledgments; defensible collection workflows.
- Preserve integrity (hashing, WORM), chain-of-custody, and scope minimization.
- Coordinate with counsel and privacy; limit to need-to-know access.
- Maintain inventories of data sources (email, chat, endpoints, cloud, backups).
- **Verify:** check official (ISC)² CBK and current exam outline.
## Exam Relevance
- Choose legal hold to avoid spoliation and sanctions.
**Mnemonic:** “**Hold** first, then **harvest**.”
## Mini Scenario
Q: Backup purge scheduled during lawsuit—what do Ops do?
A: Pause deletion for in-scope data; document hold; notify custodians.
## Revision Checklist
- Two legal hold actions.
- Integrity controls.
- Scope/need-to-know.
## Related
[[Legal Holds and Evidence Retention for Security Tests]] · [[Log Integrity Time Sync and Retention]] · [[Digital Forensics in Operations (Triage First Response)]] · [[Reporting and Executive Summaries]] · [[Domain 7 - Index]]