Unfortunately, your experience differs in ways that don't apply categorically to the points I made from my perspective and experience. We have hooks into the f

Unfortunately, your experience differs in ways that don't apply categorically to the points I made from my perspective and experience. We have hooks into the fleet of endpoints (corporate with some 10k BYODs), servers, and various vendor apps. This is realized by data legal provides reduced to a boolean per user because there's no need to convey excess detail. When an employee visits Help Desk, they are limited by the possible actions HD can take if they are under a legal hold. The same applies to certain OS upgrades, whether HD or DIY. It would be impossible to manage VDI or "throwaway" servers at scale without a centralized legal hold inquiry API. Google has (or had) a far greater corporate tech staff / employee ratio in the industry than similar companies, so there's no excuse for them not to have a comprehensive legal hold program throughout their technical organization.