Once an investigation is authorized, the compliance team must act quickly to secure and preserve all relevant evidence before it can be altered, destroyed, or deleted.

[Triage Complete] ---> [Draft Legal Hold Directive] ---> [Deactivate Auto-Delete Logs]
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[Review Case Assets] <--- [Secure Forensic Server Mirrors] <-----+

Investigators work with corporate IT and legal counsel to issue an explicit Legal Hold Directive. This notice instructs affected employees to preserve all physical and electronic documents related to the inquiry. Crucially, corporate IT must disable auto-delete policies for emails, server logs, and backup files across the affected business units.

Investigators use specialized software to create exact, bit-stream copies of hard drives, mobile phones, and cloud databases. This process records files without changing system metadata (such as timestamps or file creators), ensuring the evidence remains admissible in court.