Overview of Microsoft 365 Advanced eDiscovery
In this tutorial, we will get to learn about Microsoft 365 Advanced eDiscovery.
The Advanced eDiscovery solution in Microsoft 365 builds on the existing Microsoft eDiscovery and analytics capabilities. Advanced eDiscovery provides an end-to-end workflow to preserve, collect, analyze, review, analyze, and export content that’s responsive to your organization’s internal and external investigations.
Advanced eDiscovery capabilities
This can help your organization respond to legal matters or internal investigations by discovering data where it lives. Moreover, you can seamlessly manage eDiscovery workflows by identifying persons of interest and their data sources. And, then, seamlessly apply holds to preserve data, and then manage the legal hold communication process.
1. Discover and collect data in-place
Advanced eDiscovery in Microsoft 365 lets you discover data at the source and staying within your Microsoft 365 security and compliance boundary. By collecting data in place from the live system, Advanced eDiscovery reduces the friction of going back to the source and reduces unnecessary work of having to find the missing content, which often happens when journaling lags in traditional eDiscovery solutions.
Native search and collection capabilities for data in Teams, Yammer, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Exchange Online further enhances data discovery. For example, Advanced eDiscovery:
- Firstly, reconstructs Teams conversations (instead of returning individual messages from conversations).
- Secondly, collects cloud-based content shared with users by use of links or modern attachments in email message and Teams chats.
- Thirdly, has built-in support for hundreds of non-Microsoft 365 file types.
- Lastly, collects data from third-party sources importe and archive in Microsoft 365 by data connectors.
2. Manage eDiscovery workflow in one platform
Advanced eDiscovery can help you reduce the number of eDiscovery solutions you need to rely on. Moreover, it provides a streamlined, end-to-end workflow, all which occurs within Microsoft 365.
Further, Advanced eDiscovery helps reduce the friction of identifying and collecting potential sources of relevant information by automatically mapping unique and shared data sources to the person of interest. And by providing reporting and analytics on potentially relevant data prior to collecting it for analysis and review.
3. Cull data intelligently
Intelligent, machine learning capabilities in Advanced eDiscovery help you reduce the amount of data to review. These intelligent capabilities help you reduce and cull large volumes of data to a relevant set. For example, a built-in review set query helps filter only for unique content by identifying near duplicates. This capability can substantially reduce the amount of data to review.
Advanced eDiscovery alignment with the Electronic Discovery Reference Model
The built-in workflow of Advanced eDiscovery in Microsoft 365 aligns with the eDiscovery process outlined by the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM).
At a high level, here’s how Advanced eDiscovery supports the EDRM workflow:
- Firstly, Identification. After you identify potential persons of interest in an investigation, you can add them as custodians to an Advanced eDiscovery case. After users are added as custodians, it’s easy to preserve, collect, and review custodian documents.
- Secondly, Preservation. To preserve and protect data that’s relevant to an investigation, Advanced eDiscovery lets you place a legal hold on the data sources associated with the custodians in a case.
- Thirdly, Collection. After you identified (and preserved) the data sources relevant to the investigation, you can use the built-in search tool in Advanced eDiscovery to search for and collect live data from the custodial data sources that may be relevant to the case.
- Then, Processing. After you’ve collected all data relevant to the case, the next step is to process it for further review and analysis.
- Next, Review. After data has been added to a review set, you can view specific documents and run additional queries to reduce the data to what is most relevant to the case.
- Analysis. Advanced eDiscovery provides an integrated analytics tool that helps you further cull data from the review set that you determine isn’t relevant to the investigation.
- Lastly, Production and Presentation. When you’re ready, you can export documents from a review set for legal review. You can export documents in their native format or in an EDRM-specified format so they can be imported into third-party review applications.
Reference: Microsoft Documentation