Appendix L: Collect-to-Preserve Matter Playbook

Collect-to-Preserve is an operating discipline. The playbook below describes what 'good' looks like when a matter triggers preservation.

L.1 Matter Trigger and Scope Definition

• Create an immutable scope definition: custodians, repositories, time bounds, and rationale.
• Resolve custodian identities to natural persons; capture effective-dated identity snapshots for the relevant period.
• Identify collaboration spaces where work occurred (teams, channels, sites) using evidence-based signals where possible.

L.2 Preservation Actions

• Preserve custodial repositories and relevant shared repositories within scope.
• Enumerate and preserve version lineage for in-scope objects per policy.
• Resolve modern attachments and links referenced by communications; preserve as-sent versions and relationship bindings.

L.3 Validation and Exception Triage

• Run referential integrity checks: every message-linked reference resolves or produces an exception record.
• Review exception dashboard; prioritize remediation for permission-denied and throttling classes.
• Lock preservation artifacts as immutable evidence once validated.

L.4 Export and Reproducibility

• Generate export package with manifest, hashes, load/overlay files, and exception overlays.
• Verify reproducibility by rerunning export under identical scope definition and comparing manifests/hashes.
• Provide downstream teams with relationship mappings and provenance fields to avoid re-flattening context.