Category Archives: law firm

August 5, 2025 · 9:57 AM

Why Most eDiscovery Tools and Online Archiving Offerings Are Terrible for Information Governance

By John Patzakis and Chas Meier

Many organizations assume that information governance initiatives—such as data privacy audits, purging ROT (Redundant, Obsolete, or Trivial) data, merger and acquisition-driven data separation, or data breach impact assessments—can be effectively addressed using eDiscovery tools or online archiving platforms. After all, eDiscovery solutions excel at identifying and searching through large volumes of unstructured data in high-stakes, reactive legal scenarios.

However, there is a critical distinction between eDiscovery and information governance workflows that organizations must understand when selecting the right solution. eDiscovery typically involves copying large volumes of data at multiple stages and continually moving that data upstream, eventually into third-party cloud platforms for processing and hosting. In contrast, duplicating and moving massive data sets is often the last thing you want to do in information governance projects, which are typically large-scale, enterprise-wide initiatives.

In fact, here are five major reasons why most eDiscovery tools and online archiving solutions are terrible for information governance. These tools:

  1. Dramatically Increase Risk
    Consider a scenario where an organization suffers a data breach and must assess 100 terabytes of data to identify compromised PII and determine reporting obligations. Most eDiscovery tools require a full copy of this data to be made and uploaded into a third-party environment—doubling the volume of sensitive material and compounding the risk. Instead of helping, this kind of mass data duplication exacerbates the compliance and privacy risks that governance initiatives aim to reduce. In fact, such inefficient data duplication directly conflicts with GDPR principles, which require data minimalization and proportionality.
  2. Are Exorbitantly Expensive
    Information governance is not a small, tactical effort—it is a broad, enterprise-wide initiative. At X1, we rarely see governance projects involving less than 50 terabytes of data. Using traditional eDiscovery pricing models, even with volume-based discounts, these projects can quickly rack up tens of millions of dollars in costs due to unnecessary processing, storage, and hosting workflows designed for litigation—not governance.
  3. Can’t Meet Time Constraints
    Copying, transferring, uploading, and indexing 100 terabytes of data into a third-party cloud platform can easily take six months or more, even in an ideal scenario. That timeline is incompatible with the urgent nature of most information governance use cases, such as data breach impact assessments or M&A-related audits. Worse yet, by the time the data has been copied and indexed, it will likely already be stale—undermining the integrity of the project from the outset.
  4. Create Remediation Roadblocks
    Suppose you incur the costs and risk to copy and upload a full data set in an external review platform and successfully identify sensitive or outdated data for remediation. Now what? You are merely working with copies of the data. The originals remain distributed across Microsoft 365, file servers, laptops, and other locations. Trying to trace back and manually remediate live data sources is costly, disruptive, and error-prone—defeating the very efficiency goals of the governance project.
  5. Do not Support Microsoft 365 Effectively
    Many so-called “governance” tools are simply rebranded email archiving systems that rely on bulk copying data out of Microsoft 365. Not only is this approach expensive and inefficient, but it also creates serious technical and compliance risks. Microsoft 365 does not support mass data exports at scale without significant friction, and errors are common—as illustrated in FTC v. Match Group, No. 3:19-CV-2281-K, 2025 WL 46024 (N.D. Tex. Jan. 7, 2025). In that case, Microsoft Purview exports into an archival system failed, resulting in court-imposed discovery sanctions. If a solution does not support index-in-place capabilities—allowing analysis directly upon the native data—it is simply not viable for modern information governance needs.

A Different Approach is Required
Information governance requires agility, precision, and a fundamentally different approach than traditional eDiscovery processes. Organizations must be wary of legacy eDiscovery tools and outdated archiving platforms masquerading as governance solutions.

X1 Enterprise was purpose-built to address the challenges and inefficiencies that plague traditional eDiscovery tools and archiving platforms when applied to information governance. At the core of the X1 Enterprise Platform is its patented micro-indexing architecture, which enables organizations to search, analyze, and act on data in place, without needing to first copy, move, or centralize it.

This index-in-place capability means X1 can connect directly to endpoints, file shares, Microsoft 365, and other enterprise data sources to perform fast, scalable, and highly targeted data sweeps and analysis—without duplicating the data or exposing it to unnecessary risk. Whether you are performing a data privacy audit, a breach impact assessment, or an M&A data separation project, you can run real-time searches across tens of terabytes and thousands of custodians—with results returned in minutes, not months, and the data remediation performed in-place.

By eliminating the need for data movement, X1 avoids the five major pitfalls of legacy tools:
• Risk: No mass duplication of data, reducing exposure and aligning with GDPR and other regulatory requirements.
• Cost: No massive ingestion or hosting fees—X1 dramatically lowers total project costs by working directly with live data.
• Time: Deploy and execute governance initiatives in a fraction of the time required by traditional methods.
• Remediation: Act directly on live data—flag it, move it, delete it, or apply tags—in the original source locations.
• Microsoft 365 Compatibility: X1 integrates natively with Microsoft 365 and other systems without requiring cumbersome exports or expensive additional licensing and services, enabling robust, reliable governance at enterprise scale. Simply put, we believe X1 provides the best available support for M365 data sources.

In short, X1 Enterprise offers a faster, safer, and far more cost-effective way to execute complex information governance projects—turning what used to be massive, reactive, months-long efforts into streamlined, proactive, and strategic workflows.

Learn more about how X1 Enterprise can streamline your next information governance project. Schedule a demo today at sales@x1.com or visit www.x1.com/solutions/x1-enterprise-platform.

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April 9, 2025 · 11:37 AM

The Three Different eDiscovery Approaches to Address Microsoft 365 Data

By John Patzakis

Microsoft reports 345 million paid users worldwide of its Microsoft 365 platform (“M365”), spanning over two million companies, with more than one million of them based in the United States. M365’s cloud-based data sources such as OneDrive, Outlook mail, Teams and SharePoint online represent arguably the majority of ESI being produced in litigation going forward. However, M365 presents significant eDiscovery challenges and costs, requiring legal and eDiscovery professionals to be aware of the various methods to address this critical data source.

This article briefly addresses the benefits and challenges of each of the three main approaches to addressing eDiscovery and information governance in M365: 1) Utilizing Microsoft Purview; 2) Outsourced Services; or 3) Relying on a 3rd Party Purpose-build eDiscovery Solution.

Microsoft Purview
Microsoft Purview is the built-in M365 eDiscovery tool. It comes in different licensing tiers, the highest and most useful being Premium, or also known as E5 licenses. A key benefit of utilizing Purview Premium is that it’s integrated with M365, which is obviously convenient for workflow and also budgeting. Purview features a good legal hold process that allows the application of legal holds in place for key M365 data sources.

There is also a good consultant ecosystem to provide training and add-on services, which are often needed to address the larger projects at extra cost. And a premium license provides other functionalities unrelated to eDiscovery such as data analytics for business as well as a lot of security functions.

As far as the challenges of MS Purview Premium that we hear from users, a common complaint is that it can be very expensive, with licenses costing about $600 per employee annually. For large cases, licenses for several thousand custodians run in the millions of dollars and well into the tens of millions when you are dealing with a company with about 40,000 employees.

But the biggest complaint that we hear is that it’s not suited for large cases, M365 is built for user productivity, and the shared architecture is designed to support hundreds of millions of global users with normal individual workloads. eDiscovery and information governance projects are very large and aberrant workloads, so the system is designed to throttle large data throughputs. For instance, when you start a case in Purview, a separate and new index is created to allow eDiscovery and compliance searches in Purview, but there is a 2 GB hourly limit when creating this index — according to Microsoft’s own documentation — which limits your ability to address larger cases in a timely manner. There are many documented concerns about the accuracy and transparency of search results and data exports, especially as cases get bigger and there’s more custodians with higher volumes. Also, large attachments over 150 mb are not being a supported, as well as many filetypes such as engineering files like CAD drawings. MS only supports 50 file types, while the right eDiscovery software will support over 500.

These search accuracy and throughput limitations were called out by a Special Master Phillip Favro in the case of Deal Genius, LLC v. O2COOL, LLC, No. 21-C-2046, 2022 WL 17418933, at *1–2 (N.D. Ill. Oct. 24, 2022), and further expounded upon by Favro is his recent technical whitepaper:

“Purview eDiscovery does not provide the advanced features offered by a full service e-discovery platform needed to support discovery efforts in complex cases such as multidistrict litigation and class actions or regulatory investigations like Hart-Scott-Rodino Second Requests. Even small lawsuits that involve high volumes of ESI can present difficulties for organizations that wish to manage much of their discovery process with Purview eDiscovery. Responding parties that rely on Purview eDiscovery may not be able to perform a comprehensive search to reasonably identify relevant information. Responding parties who wish to incorporate Purview eDiscovery functionality into their discovery workflows must understand its search limitations and take steps to address them so they can establish the defensibility of their discovery process.” “Microsoft Purview eDiscovery: Key Features and Limitations,” Practical Law (July 2024).

Finally, Purview only addresses data within 365. It’s not going to address data sources such as Slack, or on-premises sources including laptops, fileshares, even on prem exchange or on-Prem SharePoint.

Outsourced Services
The second approach to addressing M365 for eDiscovery is to retain an outsourced service provider. There are well over 100 consulting firms that perform such services, and the main benefit is that the right consultants can get the job done. The consultants know how to export M365 data into a standard eDiscovery workflow, are very good at project management, and are well-versed with working with attorneys and their litigation deadlines. For companies that are smaller without the internal resources or expertise or have backlogs, this can be a good approach.

The main drawback is that it can be very expensive, because often times what we generally see is the service providers parachute in and run very basic scripts to conduct a mass data export from M365. After that, it defaults to a traditional eDiscovery workflow with processing tools, a lot of manual services, and then an upload to a standard review platform. This reactive approach results in a high amount of expensive data overcollection. Additionally, outsourced service providers typically require very high level, super-admin privileges in order to run their bulk data download scripts, which can be a significant concern from a security standpoint. These privileges can be delegated sometimes without the company’s knowledge, so it is important to be aware of and audit the privileges that are being granted.

Also, we have seen that for large eDiscovery collection projects in Europe, EU based companies are required to perform a data protection impact analysis (DPIA), and mass bulk collections involving copying of all the employees’ emails and other sensitive files and taking that data offsite are frowned upon by privacy auditors. That approach runs afoul of the GDPR’s proportionality and data minimalization requirements.

Third Party eDiscovery Software Solution
And finally, a third approach is utilizing a non-Microsoft eDiscovery solution that’s purpose- built to conduct eDiscovery, including by connecting to M365. A benefit of this approach is that the right solution can scale for larger data sets. This is particularly important for information governance projects such as data compliance audits. The good solutions will not require expensive Premium Purview licensing for every custodian and will enable you to employ it as an established and repeatable process. It can also address the indexing throughput and completeness challenges in Purview. And finally, a platform like this should be able to support data outside of M365 such as on-premises sources or data such as Slack.

One of the challenges of an in-house system is that internal IT resources or tech savvy paralegals are needed to run the process. Some technology platforms still require you to have the most expensive Purview Premium licensing to support essential functionality, such as collection of hyper-linked documents, and other key features. Further, many of these vendors are simply providing repurposed email archiving platforms, which function by a mass copy and transfer of all the organization’s data in M365. This poses significant logistical challenges in terms of scalability, not to mention unnecessary cost. M365 does not easily allow for the mass data download, which can lead to errors and data corruption, as in the recent case of FTC v. Match Group, No. 3:19-CV-2281-K, 2025 WL 46024, at *4 (N.D. Tex. Jan. 7, 2025) where MS Purview exports to an email archival system failed, resulting in court imposed discovery sanctions. So, if the solution does not allow for index in place functionality, but a bulk download, copy and data transfer, then there can be significant challenges with that approach.

The X1 Enterprise platform for 365 and on-premises sources takes a unique approach with a micro indexing architecture so that each data source and each custodian is associated with their own index. This enables a true index in place keep capability for targeted search and analytics at the point of collection, which enables the bypassing of most of the M365 throttling issues so that hundreds of custodians can be addressed in hours, not weeks. Our customers have successfully addressed matters involving thousands of custodians and upwards of 80 terabytes of M365 data that was indexed in a very short period of time. X1 Enterprise does not require Purview Premium licensing to address all the required functionality, such as the search and collection of hyperlinked files, archived email, inactive mailboxes, as well as many other detailed requirements.

Simply put, we believe X1 Enterprise is the best solution available to address M365 data for eDiscovery and information governance requirements.

Ready to Learn More?
For companies navigating complex information governance and eDiscovery requirements, including those involving M365, organizations that rely on the  X1 Enterprise Platform  not only reduce costs and save valuable time but also gain a strategic advantage in managing their eDiscovery and information governance needs. For a demonstration of the X1 Enterprise Platform, contact us at sales@x1.com. For more details on this innovative solution, please visit www.x1.com/solutions/x1-enterprise-platform.

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February 12, 2025 · 12:22 PM

X1 Enterprise Successfully Passes GDPR-Mandated Data Protection Impact Assessment

By John Patzakis

The European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires that subject organizations ensure and demonstrate the protection of personal data under their control. GDPR Article 35 mandates that when implementing new data collection technologies or engaging in a major new project involving significant data collection, an organization must perform a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA).

Recently, a Fortune 500 company with global operations successfully implemented X1 Enterprise to address their eDiscovery and information governance requirements throughout the EU region, involving both Microsoft 365 and on-premises data sources. This implementation required the vetting of X1 Enterprise by auditors and the internal Data Protection Officer through an extensive DPIA process, which X1 passed. The effort provides important industry insights into how our Fortune 500 customer leveraged X1’s unique, on-premises index-in-place and targeted search and collection features, as well as other data minimization capabilities, to meet the DPIA requirements.

The EU provides official guidance and a checklist for conducting an Article 35 DPIA. Among the key requirements is the consideration of the “current state of the technology” in the area and that the technology and collection processes have adequate “proportionality measures” in their collection capabilities to “ensure data minimalisation.” If processes and technology engage in overly broad data collection, the guidance suggests considering alternative technologies and methods.

The team at our Fortune 500 customer emphasized the following unique data minimalization capabilities and features of X1 Enterprise in their DPIA:

  1. Index and Search Data In-Place. X1’s proprietary micro indexes enable the searching of data on laptops, file servers and Microsoft in-place so that only the potentially relevant data is collected for eDiscovery and data audits, which fulfills the GDPR’s proportionality requirements. In contrast, tools that require full disc imaging for basic eDiscovery collection are extremely problematic.

    As the court said in In re Ford Motor Company, 345 F.3d 1315: “[E]xamination of a hard drive inevitably results in the production of massive amounts of irrelevant, and perhaps privileged, information…” Even worse, the collected data is then re-duplicated, often multiple times, by the examiner for archival purposes. And then the data is sent downstream for processing, which results in even more data duplication. Load files are created for further transfers, which are also duplicated. Notably, EU guidance for a DPIA analysis requires that organizations consider alternative data collection technologies and methods that have better “proportionality measures” to “ensure data minimalization.”
  2. Blind Searches and User Enabled Review. Using X1 Enterprise, an administrator can run detailed system wide searches and receive a detailed search result report without having access or possession of the target data. Instead, the administrator can direct X1 to first present the search results to the end-user employee to review and apply tags to identify personal, relevant or non-personal data, thereby applying clear and detailed consent to the subsequent collection of any relevant information.
  3. Segmentation of Data Regions vs. Creation of Central Data Lakes. X1 can be deployed behind an organizations’ firewall or their own private cloud instance in the EU. Each custodian/employee is associated with a single micro-index. This allows X1 to target searches to specific EU counties and segments of users. This contrasts to archiving or other eDiscovery tools that require bulk copying and intermingling of all user data to a central location, where additional back-up copies are made, all which directly run afoul of the data minimalization and proportionality requirements of the GDPR.
  4. Delete Data In-Place. GDPR requires the deletion of non-compliant on demand. Purging data on managed archives does not suffice if other copies are on laptops, unmanaged servers and other unstructured sources. X1’s on-premises distributed architecture uniquely enables the systematic deleting of data in place.
  5. Platform to Enforce GDPR and Privacy Policies. In addition to asserting X1 met the requirements and standards under GDPR mandated DPIA, our Fortune 500 customer noted as further justification in their DPIA that they also planned to utilize X1 Enterprise to enforce privacy policies and provisions under the GDPR. X1 Enterprise is an ideal platform to respond to Data Subject Access requests, proactively audit data sources to identify and remediate personal information, as well as systematically purge unneeded data that may contain personal information of EU data subjects.

    Ready to Learn More?
    For companies navigating complex information governance and eDiscovery requirements, including those involving M365, the  X1 Enterprise Platform ensures compliance while protecting privacy. By implementing X1 Enterprise, organizations can not only reduce costs and save valuable time but also gain a strategic advantage in managing their information governance needs. For a demonstration of the X1 Enterprise Platform, contact us at sales@x1.com. For more details on this innovative solution, please visit www.x1.com/solutions/x1-enterprise-platform.

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January 22, 2025 · 10:34 AM

Inactive Mailboxes in M365 Present Significant Hidden Risks and Costs

By Chas Meier and John Patzakis

In our recent blog post, we outlined the challenges associated with inactive mailboxes in Microsoft 365. The response was very positive, and this post dives a bit deeper into the specific challenges with MS Purview in addressing inactive mailboxes, including some hidden pitfalls and risks that many enterprises may not be aware of.

Limited Visibility in Microsoft Purview
Microsoft Purview allows users with the eDiscovery Manager role (each provisioned with an E5 license) to search both active and inactive mailboxes to meet legal or regulatory requirements. However, one of the first hurdles administrators face is simply identifying which mailboxes are inactive. Inactive mailboxes do not appear in the standard active user lists and require additional steps to locate, whether through Purview or the Microsoft 365 admin center. An even bigger challenge is Purview’s limitation: when you query for inactive mailboxes, it will only display a maximum of 5,000—even if more exists. One of our customers, for example, discovered tens of thousands of additional inactive mailboxes using X1, far exceeding Purview’s 5,000 limit. Compounding this challenge, Purview cannot distinguish between an inactive mailbox placed on litigation hold versus one on a retention tag for other reasons, leaving organizations unable to quickly determine which mailboxes are truly subject to legal holds.

How Inactive Mailboxes Are Created
This problem partly stems from Microsoft 365’s process for creating inactive users. Under pressure to free up M365 licenses for new employees, administrators might place holds or retention tags on a departing user’s account “just to be safe” until they know how to manage that user’s data. Once the license is removed, a grace period begins; after it expires, the mailbox is moved into the inactive mailbox collection, ensuring its contents remain discoverable for eDiscovery and compliance purposes.

However, there is no built-in mechanism to automatically remove these holds once they are no longer needed, so IT and legal teams must manually intervene. As a result, organizations with high turnover often retain far more inactive mailboxes than necessary. This not only increases legal exposure but will also incur additional costs when Microsoft begins charging storage fees on January 27, 2025 for inactive M365 accounts on retention and legal holds. (Manage unlicensed OneDrive user accounts – SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn)

X1 Enterprise 5.3: A Streamlined Approach
With X1 Enterprise 5.3, legal and compliance professionals can now process inactive mailboxes directly within the platform using only a single E5 license and are not subject to Purview’s listing limit of 5,000 inactive mailboxes. This direct integration ensures that all preserved mailboxes are accessible and actionable.

Even better, many of our customers employ X1 Enterprise to proactively perform targeted preservation collections on M365 accounts and other sources such as laptops for departing employees, a streamlined process that significantly reduces both cost and risk.

Please contact us at the link below if you have any additional questions about inactive mailboxes in M365 and would like to inquire about a free “health check” assessment of the scope of your inactive mailboxes.

Ready to Learn More?
The X1 Enterprise Platform is available now from X1 and its global channel network in the cloud, on-premises, and with our services available on-demand. For a demonstration of the X1 Enterprise Platform, contact us at sales@x1.com. For more details on this innovative solution, please visit www.x1.com/solutions/x1-enterprise-platform.

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May 7, 2024 · 9:28 AM

Index and Search In-Place Workflows Are Essential for Information Governance

By John Patzakis and Charles Meier

Information Governance

Accurate pre-collection data insight is a game-changing capability that enables organizations and their legal teams to determine the scope, volume, and content of electronic information before the very disruptive and expensive step of collecting the data. This insight is enabled through distributed index and search in-place technology.

A true distributed index and search in-place capability for unstructured data requires a software-based indexing technology be deployed directly onto fileservers, laptops, or in the cloud to address Microsoft 365 and other cloud-based data sources. This indexing occurs where the data sources reside without requiring a bulk transfer of the data to a central location. Once indexed, searches can be performed in seconds, supporting complex Boolean operators, metadata filters and regular expressions. Searches can be iterated and refined without limitation, which is critical for large data sets.

While our previous blog post addressed the critical importance of this capability in eDiscovery matters, it is equally essential in information governance projects such as PII audits, the purging of redundant, obsolete or trivial (ROT) data, and due diligence and data separation efforts in support of corporate mergers and acquisitions. Many X1 customers have recently employed our indexing in-place technology on such projects with remarkable success.

Incredibly, many of these customers also received alternative proposals that leverage traditional eDiscovery workflows presenting much higher estimated costs and much longer durations. Traditional eDiscovery workflows mandate broad and manual data collection, copying and migration efforts, large scale data processing, and loading the data into a different platform for review and analysis. There are three fundamental reasons why this “traditional approach” is fatally flawed for information governance projects.

  1. Prohibitive Cost and Risk. The data scope of information governance projects involves terabytes and sometimes petabytes of data. Mass collection, copying and migration of these data sets with manual hand-offs for later analysis in a centralized location is extremely expensive, disruptive, and time consuming. Also, mass duplication and egress of enterprise data under control to execute ROT, PII, data separation or other due diligence projects is completely antithetical to their very purpose.
  2. The “Now What?” Problem. Let’s assume an organization has decided to incur the enormous cost, disruption and risk associated with the mass copying, migration, and centralization of unstructured data, and after loading the data into a review process, a key subset of documents and emails are finally identified for purging or other remedial action. Now what? You are merely working with copies! The live “original” emails and documents are in M365, email accounts, file servers or on laptops. It is possible to manually retrace and remediate, but that process is expensive and disruptive.
  3. Instant Staleness. Finally, a mass copying and migration effort often requiring several weeks to complete, is immediately stale once eventually completed as the live data in its original location has inevitably changed.

X1 solves these challenges though our proprietary and patented distributed index and search in-place technology that enables scale by bringing true distributed indexing in-place to laptops, file shares, M365 and other cloud sources. X1 Enterprise Collect significantly streamlines information governance workflows by identifying and allowing for the remediation of targeted data in-place, thereby eliminating the need for expensive and cumbersome data duplication and migration.

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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