Electronic discovery (also called e-discovery) refers to any process in which electronic data is sought, located, secured, and searched with the intent of using it as evidence in a civil or criminal legal case. E-discovery can be carried out offline on a particular computer or it can be done in a network.
An e-discovery policy would define how data is archived and encrypted. If the data is archived in an insecure manor, a user could be able to delete data that the user does not want to be searched. Therefore, we need to find a way of securing the data in a way that only authorized people can access the data.
A public key infrastructure (PKI) supports the distribution and identification of public encryption keys for the encryption of data. The data can only be decrypted by the private key.
In this question, we have an escrowed corporate PKI. Escrow is an independent and licensed third party that holds something (money, sensitive data etc.) and releases it only when predefined conditions have been met. In this case, Escrow is holding the private key of the PKI.
By encrypting the e-discovery data by using the PKI public key, we can ensure that the data can only be decrypted by the private key held in Escrow and this will only happen when the predefined conditions are met.