Tag Archives: law firm

May 20, 2025 · 12:04 PM

Law Firms and Major Enterprises Are Rapidly Moving to X1 Search As Traditional Enterprise Search Becomes Obsolete

By John Patzakis and Chas Meier

Are you tired of wasting hours each week fruitlessly searching across emails, documents, cloud services, and local drives? You’re not alone. Law firms and major enterprises are increasingly recognizing the inherent limitations of legacy enterprise search solutions and turning decisively toward X1 Search.

X1 Search delivers a revolutionary user-based search experience that dramatically boosts productivity. Demand for X1 Search has skyrocketed this year—one major federal agency is expanding from 20,000 to over 40,000 licenses to equip every employee. Nearly half of AMLAW 100 firms now deploy or are actively considering X1. Why this rapid shift?

Traditional enterprise search solutions are fundamentally broken in today’s hybrid-cloud enterprise landscape. They rely heavily on outdated architectures that require mass data duplication and centralization—approaches rendered obsolete by remote work and distributed platforms such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Specifically, traditional tools face:

  1. Scalability Roadblocks: Centralizing terabytes of distributed unstructured data is now effectively impossible in the modern enterprise.
  2. Incompatibility with Modern Platforms: Legacy systems struggle to integrate effectively with platforms like Microsoft 365 due to restrictive APIs and loss of security permissions when the data is copied and exported en masse.
  3. Regulatory and Governance Challenges: Mass duplication of sensitive data violates critical data protection regulations and contradicts fundamental information governance principles. The GDPR specifically mandates data minimization, particularly when viable alternative technologies exist, as evaluated through a Data Privacy Impact Analysis (DPIA).

Employees in modern organizations effectively have two viable search options: the limited native Windows search or the robust, efficient capabilities of X1 Search. Microsoft Copilot itself recently highlighted X1 Search’s advantages:

“X1 Search offers advanced indexing, instant search-as-you-type capabilities, powerful filtering, keyword highlighting, and document/email previews, significantly surpassing standard Windows Search. Moreover, X1 seamlessly searches across emails, documents, cloud storage, archived data, and more—far beyond Windows Search capabilities.”

X1 Search introduces an entirely new, distributed search architecture uniquely suited to today’s enterprise environments:
• Distributed Micro-Indexing: Patented technology ensures secure, permission-aligned indexing, granting employees immediate, secure access to authorized data only.
• No Mass Data Duplication: Interact directly with original documents without unnecessary duplication, ensuring compliance and efficiency.
• True Federated Search: Search instantly and iteratively across M365, Google Workspace, Slack, and local data sources within a single unified search field—a capability unmatched by any other solution.

The latest X1 Search transcends desktop limitations, instantly searching Microsoft Email, Teams, Slack, OneDrive, SharePoint, local files, and now Google Drive and Gmail, all from one intuitive interface. This empowers users to reclaim hours each day, dramatically boosting productivity.

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Filed under Best Practices, Business Productivity Search, Cloud Data, Corporations, Data Audit, Desktop Search, eDiscovery, Enterprise Search, ESI, GDPR, Google Workspace, Hybrid Search, Information Governance, Information Management, m365, MS Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint

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March 13, 2024 · 2:06 PM

Microsoft 365 Modern Attachments Pose Significant eDiscovery Challenges and Risk

By John Patzakis

In their excellent publication, 2023 eDiscovery Case Law in Review, Winston and Strawn, LLP, one of the top law firms in the US, highlights the challenges legal and eDiscovery professionals face with modern attachments. Modern attachments, also known as hyperlinks, are URL pointers that link to files or emails stored in another location. They are commonly found in Microsoft 365 Mail and Teams.

Winston and Strawn reports that “[r]equesting parties are increasingly sophisticated about this issue given the proliferation of Microsoft 365…and thus we have noted an uptick in requesting parties demanding that linked attachments be produced along with transmittal emails—in essence demanding that traditional email families be assembled from these pieces.” In re StubHub Refund Litig., 2023 WL 3092972 (N.D. Cal. April 25, 2023) is a case cited by the authors as a recent decision requiring the production of modern attachments in discovery.

The one area I disagree with in the report is its view that without investing in expensive services and Microsoft Premium licensing it may be very challenging and burdensome to identify and collect modern attachments. If you rely on Microsoft Purview for eDiscovery compliance and information governance, you must upgrade to expensive premium licensing that can add up to tens of millions of dollars in additional expense for larger enterprises. And even then, there are significant throughput and defensibility challenges.

eDiscovery service providers have stepped into the mix to provide manual services to address MS 365 challenges. But throwing services at the problem is disruptive, inefficient, and expensive as well.

X1 provides a different approach. X1 Enterprise Collect provides full support for modern attachments in MS Mail and in Teams. X1 is the only solution we and our partners are aware of that supports the search and collection of modern attachments in MS 365 without the need for a Premium (E5) license or additional manual services. This is because X1 Enterprise Collect does not operate by simply making bulk calls to the MS Graph API, like most eDiscovery tools, which also require a premium license to collect the key data such as modern attachments. X1 employs a targeted, custodian-based approach that minimizes 365 API calls, and does not rely on the MS Search Index, which has been demonstrated to be untrustworthy and with limited throughput. X1’s approach enables a very scalable, defensible, and robust data collection at speeds 10x that of other approaches.

The X1 Enterprise Collect Platform is available now from X1 and its global channel network in the cloud and on-premise. For a demonstration of the X1 Enterprise Collect Platform, contact us at sales@x1.com. For more details on this innovative solution, please visit www.x1.com/x1-enterprise-collect-platform.

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Filed under Best Practices, Case Law, Cloud Data, Corporations, eDiscovery, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, law firm, MS Teams, OneDrive

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February 22, 2017 · 9:01 AM

Declining Law Firm Productivity Tied to Information Governance Challenges

A new legal industry study finds a substantial decline in attorney productivity in recent years, significantly reducing law firm profitability. In its 2017 Report on the State of the Legal Market, Thomson Reuters notes that “over the past 10 years, the average billable hours worked by all lawyers across the market declined from 134 billable hours per month in 2007 to 122 through the late part of 2016.” This equals a reduction of 144 billable hours per year per lawyer. The report, by multiplying that total by the average worked rate ($463) for all lawyers in 2016, determined the productivity decline is costing law firms about $66,672 per lawyer per year.

One of the main causes for diminished lawyer productivity is the exponential proliferation of their stored emails and documents and the associated inability to recall important work product and previous e-mail communications. Another industry study assessing the productivity of lawyers and other high-end information knowledge workers found that such professionals on average spend 11.2 hours a week dealing with challenges related to document creation and management. As the table below from the IDC report demonstrates, lawyers and paralegals lose as much as 2.3 hours a week searching, but not finding, the right documents and emails and another 2 hours recreating documents they failed to locate.

Time Spent on Document Management Challenges

productivity-for-law-firms-table2Source: IDC’s Information Worker Survey, June 2012

Applying the same lawyer cost calculations used by Thomson Reuters in their 2017 report (4.3 hours per week X $463 average hourly rate X 49 annual worked weeks) reveals that an effective search capability can dramatically improve law firm productivity by as much as $97,500 annually per lawyer. Even normalizing this analysis for recovered billable time (assuming every hour of gained productivity results in less than a full hour of actual billable time) a law firm of a 1000 attorneys would realize tens of millions per year in recovered billable hours, in addition to important intangible benefits including enhanced work product, improved client satisfaction and attorney morale.

Many law firm attorneys tell us that without the right search solution, they can spend hours looking for a past proposal, a key client communication from several months prior, or many other forms of work product and client communications that are stored in emails, local drives or cloud file shares. If lawyers and paralegals cannot quickly find such information assets, then that represents a serious information governance failure. Time wasted rummaging around for past emails and documents is not billable time and directly cuts into a firms’ profit margin. To be sure, a law firm’s two most important assets are its professionals and their body of work product and other key information. As such, a top priority for law firm management should be to ensure their attorneys have the right productivity search solution to quickly find and retrieve the firms’ information assets.

However, the recurring theme we hear is that outside of the data managed by X1, enterprise search is a source of major frustration for law firms and other organizations. This is confirmed by survey after survey where the vast majority of respondents report dissatisfaction with their current enterprise search platform. Simply put, the traditional approach to enterprise search has not worked. This is largely because most search solutions deployed in recent years focused on IT requirements — which see search as either a technical project or a commodity — rather than an intimate end-user driven requirement that is core to their professional productivity.

And for lawyers especially, “good enough” is not good enough when it comes to their search. It does not make sense to invest in an enterprise search solution for business productivity search, unless there is a significant improvement in the end-users search experience for emails, files and SharePoint data.

At X1, however, many of our customers report dramatic improvements with their productivity search, with firm-wide X1 rollouts being major wins at their organization. We believe that X1’s unique focus on the end-user is the key. You won’t find many other business productivity search solutions where the end users drive demand, instead of the tool being imposed on the end-users by IT or systems integrators. We continually hear countless testimonials from business professionals, at law firms and companies large and small, who swear by their X1 and cannot imagine working without it. In speaking with industry analysts and other experts in the enterprise search field, this is an almost unheard of phenomenon, where end-user satisfaction with the companies’ enterprise search platform is usually around 10-15 percent, verses the 80-85 percent satisfaction ratio we see with X1.

Importantly, X1 is a platform. Users need a single-pane-of-glass view to all of their information – email, files, SharePoint, archives like Veritas Enterprise Vault, OneDrive, Box and other network and cloud sources.  X1 Search provides a user-friendly interface to all information that lets attorneys find what they are looking for in an instant.  But the thousands of X1 end users know all this. The key takeaway for CIOs and other IT executives is that search is an inherently personal user experience, and the number one requirement, by far, for a successful search initiative is enthusiastic end-user adoption. If the lawyers and other business professionals in your organization are not passionately embracing the search solution, then nothing else matters.

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Filed under law firm, productivity, Uncategorized

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June 10, 2014 · 8:43 AM

“Elephant in the Room” – Case Studies of Social Media in Civil and Criminal Cases

Editor’s Note: We are pleased to welcome a guest blogger Mark Lanterman, Chief Technology Officer of Computer Forensics Services, Inc, (CFS) a Minnesota-based eDiscovery and computer forensics services firm. CFS features an innovative and cutting-edge practice supporting social media investigations.

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Social media is now a very public extension of an individual’s life.  Its widespread appeal and ease of use has given rise to new digital profiles that share extensive and mostly publically available information. However, despite being a treasure trove of potentially relevant information, social media is often overlooked in litigation.

In my practice — involving matters performed on behalf of law firms and law enforcement agencies — social media is, more often than not, a crucial stone to upturn for key evidence, and in many cases proves to be the “smoking gun”.  In fact, social media evidence is relevant and important over 70 percent of the cases we handle. And thanks to the public nature of social media evidence and the automation and scalability of X1 Social Discovery, we are able to proactively collect social media evidence in our cases, which has been a game-changer in several instances.

For instance, I recently received a call from the local sheriff’s office regarding a series of threatening Twitter and Facebook posts being made against public figures.  The mentally ill man responsible for the posts included updates and photos from his visits to the pubic figures’ homes.  The up-to-the-minute captures we obtained with X1 Social Discovery gave law enforcement the opportunity to catch up with the suspect before he was able to elevate his threats and/or delete his threatening posts.  Furthermore, X1 Social Discovery’s collections are easily delivered to the necessary parties in a timely manner, which allowed law enforcement to charge the man with terroristic threats and stalking.

Social media is also extremely valuable for eDiscovery investigations in civil cases.  For example, in a recent intellectual property theft suit, I used X1 to collect the publicly available LinkedIn profile of a disgruntled employee, who left her company for a competitor.  The woman’s LinkedIn profile disclosed that she began her tenure with the competitor nearly three months before she officially quit.  Using the date provided, I was able to determine that same week she copied thousands of confidential electronic records to a USB thumb drive from her work-issued laptop.  The evidence collected by X1 Social Discovery proved to be extremely valuable, and when used in conjunction with other evidence, a settlement was reached in a matter of hours after the analysis results were produced.  In this way, social media provides important context to other aspects of discovery.

In fact, it is now a routine practice for us to proactively preserve social media evidence, even if not explicitly requested by our clients.  Earlier this year, I was working on a civil case and, immediately upon being retained, collected the opposing party’s public Facebook and Twitter profiles using X1 Social Discovery.  A few weeks later, I brought to the attention of my client the fact that this person’s Facebook and Twitter accounts had been deleted shortly after the Court had entered a preservation order.  Thankfully, we had collected these accounts ahead of time; which contained relevant information, including incriminating posts that weakened her case. The matter was settled within a week.

Often, lawyers are uncomfortable about social media collections given its newness and bad experiences when relying on screen captures. It’s true that social media collections can present unique challenges when best practices are not utilized. But as it is now essential to nearly all digital investigations, I am always sure to advise my clients about collecting it, something that would otherwise be very burdensome and would not scale without X1 Social Discovery.  With the ever-changing nature of computer forensic investigations and e-discovery, it is important for attorneys and investigators to keep an open mind, as well as stay current on social media’s growing capabilities, which are expanding goldmines for potentially relevant information.  Once litigation has started, it is important to preserve everything that could be deemed relevant.  With the ease of access afforded to users and the semi-volatile nature of social media data, X1 allows for an efficient and admissible collection method.

 

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Filed under Social Media Investigations, Social Media Metadata

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November 28, 2011 · 8:21 AM

Can Lawyers Be Disqualified by Merely Viewing a Linkedin Profile? The Implications of Indirect Social Media Communications and Legal Ethics Rules

With attorneys and their hired consultants routinely collecting social media evidence for investigation and eDiscovery purposes, it is important to be aware that such activity can generate various direct and indirect communications to the subject account owners.  Sending a Facebook “friend” or a LinkedIn “connect” request are obvious examples, but there are also less overt means of social media communications. For instance, if a hypothetical law firm named Smith & Wesson were to merely follow a witness on Twitter, the service will automatically email the witness with a notification that Smith & Wesson is now following her. Additionally, it is all too easy when viewing a Facebook page to inadvertently “like” an item or accidentally send a friend request through a single mouse click.  And if you simply view another’s Linkedin profile while logged into your own account, that person will often be notified that you viewed his or her profile page.  Ethical Implication

For lawyers and their hired consultants and investigators, all this can be very problematic considering legal ethics rules that strictly regulate communications with represented parties and even jurors connected to a case. Several local and state bar associations have issued legal ethics opinions discussing this issue specific to collecting social media evidence. On December 6, X1 Discovery hosted a live webinar to delve deeper into this topic with the esteemed Ralph Losey of Jackson Lewis as the featured speaker. Ralph is the lead eDiscovery partner at Jackson Lewis and the author of “The eDiscovery Team,” considered by many to be the best legal eDiscovery blog on the planet. You can register for the recorded version of this webinar at this link here. (One hour of ethics CLE credit will be available to California attorneys).

From our perspective, this critical concern involving indirect social media communications and legal ethics underscores the importance of employing best practices technology to search and collect social media evidence for investigative and eDiscovery purposes.  Collecting evidence in a manner that prevents, or at minimum, does not require that attorneys and their proxies directly or indirectly communicate with the subjects from whom they are collecting social media evidence is a core requirement for solutions that truly address investigative and eDiscovery requirements for social media. If user credentials to the social media account have been properly obtained, that is obviously ideal. However, in many instances lawyers must resort to searching and collecting publicly available information. In such situations, it is crucial that the law firm and/or its hired experts conduct such collections in the proper manner.

For instance, X1 Social Discovery software features public Facebook capture that can search and collect publicly available Facebook pages without directly or indirectly notifying the account holder. This is critical functionality for eDiscovery preservation. Additionally, X1 Social Discovery accesses and displays Facebook pages in read-only mode, preventing metadata alternation, inadvertent friend requests or “like” tagging through a simple slip of the mouse. X1 Social Discovery includes other features concerning Twitter and Linkedin that also prevent indirect communications while effectively collecting data from those sites. We will be highlighting those features in the next few weeks, but in the meantime, we hope you enjoy our webinar.

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