Tag Archives: business

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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Filed under Best Practices, CaCPA, Cloud Data, Corporations, ECA, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, GDPR, Information Governance, law firm, m365, Preservation & Collection, Records Management

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June 25, 2025 · 12:00 PM

Modernizing eDiscovery: A Huge Strategic Win for Legal Operations Executives

By John Patzakis

Modern In-Place Data Discovery

For today’s corporate legal departments, controlling runaway costs is no longer optional — it’s a mandate. Nowhere is this more evident than in the spiraling expenses for outsourced eDiscovery and information governance services. While litigation and regulatory demands continue to grow, many organizations still rely heavily on costly outside service providers to identify, collect, process, and produce electronically stored information (ESI). This outdated model drains budgets, strains timelines, and introduces unnecessary risk.

Enter the modern legal operations executive. One of their core responsibilities is to identify inefficiencies and leverage technology to reduce costs and streamline workflows. Modernizing eDiscovery and information governance processes is a very fertile and high-impact opportunity to do exactly that. Doing so can save organizations tens of millions of dollars in hard (actual) costs. Here’s how:

1) Bring eDiscovery In-House and Slash Costs with the Right Technology

Outsourced eDiscovery vendors typically charge steep hourly rates and volume-based markups for even routine tasks like identifying and collecting custodial data. Yet studies — and real-world case studies — consistently show that corporations can reduce eDiscovery costs by up to 90% by adopting targeted collection and in-place search technology.

Solutions like X1 Enterprise enable legal and compliance teams to index and search data in place — without cumbersome, time-consuming manual collection. By deploying this technology internally, the legal operations team can replace costly third-party workflows, including highly inefficient Microsoft 365 processes, with faster, defensible, and far less expensive processes. This means greater control over timelines and budgets, and reduced exposure to data security risks associated with handing over large volumes of sensitive information to multiple vendors.

2) Drive Broader Efficiencies Beyond Litigation

The benefits of a modern eDiscovery platform extend far beyond document production in a lawsuit. The same technology can be leveraged for critical information governance and data compliance functions. For example, when a company needs to respond to internal audits, regulatory data access requests, or data privacy audits and inquiries, in-place search capabilities allow teams to quickly find and manage relevant data without reinventing the wheel each time.

Legal operations executives can champion the use of enterprise eDiscovery tools for these broader use cases, creating synergies between compliance, privacy, IT, and legal teams. This not only reduces redundant spending on separate point solutions but also ensures better control of data and improved risk management across the organization.

3) Partner with Finance to Uncover Hidden Cost Savings

A key role of legal operations is to align legal spend with broader corporate financial goals. When evaluating an in-house eDiscovery solution, legal ops leaders should engage their CFO early. One common pitfall is focusing solely on capital IT budgets while overlooking how much is siphoned away from the legal operating budget to fund expensive outsourced eDiscovery services.

In one real-world example, a company assumed they could not afford an internal solution based on their limited IT budget. However, when they worked with their CFO to analyze total eDiscovery spending, they discovered they were paying tens of millions annually from a separate operating budget to outside providers. Redirecting even a fraction of this spend towards a robust internal platform not only paid for the technology but will yield millions in net savings — year after year.

Final Thoughts

For legal operations executives looking to deliver immediate cost savings, increase efficiency, and elevate the department’s strategic value, modernizing eDiscovery and information governance processes is perhaps their greatest opportunity for an immediate and significant impact. By bringing the process in-house with proven technology like X1 Enterprise, expanding its use to multiple compliance and governance scenarios, and partnering with finance to eliminate wasteful spending, legal operations can transform eDiscovery and information governance from a financial drain into a model of operational excellence.

Interested in learning more about how to achieve this transformation? Schedule a briefing today at sales@x1.com or visit www.x1.com/solutions/x1-enterprise-platform.

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Filed under Best Practices, Cloud Data, Corporations, Data Audit, ECA, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, Enterprise Search, ESI, Information Access, Information Governance, Information Management, m365, Preservation & Collection, Records Management

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June 17, 2025 · 2:56 PM

X1 Enterprise Is the Gold Standard for Data Separation in M&A Matters

By John Patzakis and Charles Meier

X1 is the Gold Standard in Data Separation

Corporate mergers and acquisitions are complex enough on their own — but when a deal involves the divestiture of an entire business unit or a carve-out of specific departments, the stakes for separating data correctly and efficiently become even higher. Legal and IT teams must identify and surgically separate emails, documents, and other unstructured electronic information to ensure that the right data goes to the acquiring party — and that what must be retained remains secure and compliant with privacy and legal requirements.

This data separation exercise is notorious for being time-consuming, extremely expensive, and highly disruptive. This is because traditional methods require heavy lifting by IT teams and service providers, endless back-and-forth with custodians, and mass data collections that literally double the risk. Worse yet, Microsoft Purview, with its known throttling and low throughput challenges for M 365 data, is not up to the task for data separation matters that invariably involve at least dozens of terabytes. These inefficiencies all lead to severe regulatory risks, runaway costs, and critical delays.

There is, however, a far better way — X1 Enterprise. Several major corporations have recently employed X1 Enterprise in high-stakes data separation matters. Once completed, the comments from our customers are the same: There was no other way they could have done it without spending millions of dollars on time-consuming and disruptive services.

Data Separation Is Not Just Another eDiscovery Project

Unlike standard eDiscovery, a divestiture-driven data separation project must carve out large volumes of live, operational data while the business continues to run. Legacy tools and processes require copying and moving the entire subject data set to a separate repository for indexing and searching — adding huge costs, time delays, and operational risk.

X1 Enterprise’s game-changing advantage lies in its distributed micro-indexing architecture and true index-in-place capability. This unique approach allows organizations to instantly search, categorize, and separate or otherwise remediate massive volumes of data where it resides — without duplicating and exporting entire data sets to third-party servers for processing.

In practical terms, this means:

Lightning-Fast Search: X1 Enterprise creates lightweight, local micro-indexes on endpoints and servers across the organization. Search results come back in seconds, no matter where the data lives — on laptops, file shares, or cloud repositories such as M365.

Minimal Disruption: Because the data stays in place, there is no need to duplicate or move sensitive content, minimizing the risk of data leakage, avoiding the bottlenecks that come with data copying and migration for centralized processing, and enabling the actual remediation to be infinitely more effective by working on the live data set. How do you execute data separation when you are working off a stale copy of the data for the categorization effort? The short answer: Up to millions of dollars in manual services to go back to the “original data” and manually separate the data for each employee and their respective data sources.

Scalability and Control: Whether the divestiture involves hundreds or thousands of custodians across geographies, X1 Enterprise scales seamlessly while giving legal and IT teams centralized control and real-time oversight.

Defensible Process: Legal teams can generate audit trails, reports, and logs to demonstrate a precise and defensible chain of custody, which is critical for regulatory and contractual compliance.

The Bottom Line: Much Faster, with Dramatically less Cost and Risk.

When time is money — and delays can put entire deals at risk — organizations cannot afford cumbersome, legacy eDiscovery workflows for carve-out data separation projects. X1 Enterprise’s innovative architecture empowers legal, compliance, and IT teams to execute precise data separations faster, with dramatically lower cost and business impact.

For any organization facing a merger, acquisition, or divestiture, X1 Enterprise is not just an upgrade — it is the modern standard for high-stakes data separation and governance.

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

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Filed under Best Practices, Case Study, Cloud Data, compliance, Corporations, Data Audit, ECA, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, GDPR, Information Access, Information Governance, Information Management, m365, Preservation & Collection, Records Management

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October 13, 2015 · 8:57 AM

A Series of Firsts: How X1 Sets the Standard for the New Enterprise Search Market

by Barry Murphy

The new world of IT demands that enterprise software support varying infrastructures – traditional managed data centers, the cloud, hybrid and virtual environments.  As a result, old-school approaches that once seemed logical no longer work in today’s reality.  For example, tightly-coupled search appliances that marry hardware and software together no longer meet the requirements of enterprises that need to make distributed workers more productive no matter what kind of device they are on.  It’s a new world for enterprise search and traditional solutions will have a very hard time adapting and scaling.

X1 is ready for the IT reality of always-on, virtual, cloud, and hybrid environments and business mobility.  This is evidenced by two “firsts” that X1 is proud to announce.  First, X1 is the first search application with an app publicly available in an Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) app store.  X1 Search Mobile is available in the AirWatch marketplace.  Given the rapid move to mobile devices for work, this is no small news.  Google just announced on Friday that searching the web is now predominantly done from mobile phones.

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It’s clear, then, that enterprise search from the mobile device is now an essential requirement for business professionals.  The mobile search app is important, but what X1 is building out is much more than that.  In order to effectively deliver enterprise search from the mobile device requires having the back-end infrastructure to support full enterprise search in virtual environments.  It also requires supporting the next-generation desktop (VDI or DaaS) where the users live. X1 has uniquely mastered such back-end infrastructure with the only desktop search (VDI or otherwise) and enterprise search solution that are VMware Ready certified.

The second “first” that X1 is proud of is the listing of X1 Rapid Discovery in the Amazon AWS Marketplace.  Again, this is no small feat – this is the first enterprise-grade search and eDiscovery application to be available in the AWS Marketplace.

AWS marketplace

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Organizations storing content in AWS can now get full-featured enterprise search and eDiscovery deployed right next to their content.  And, if these organizations store other content locally, they can deploy Rapid Discovery in their own data center as well and have a single-pane-of-glass across all information no matter where it lives.

X1 will continue to provide solutions that work in the infrastructures that organizations utilize today.  The traditional approach to search will not work, but with X1, companies will have the flexibility to deploy into any environment and give users a powerful search experience on any device.  That is a powerful productivity tool – and businesses require worker productivity the same way humans require oxygen.  It is a new enterprise search market out there and X1 is uniquely positioned to lead the charge.

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August 4, 2015 · 9:06 AM

Gibson Dunn Report: Number of Cases Involving Social Media Evidence “Skyrocket”

By John Patzakis

Global law firm Gibson Dunn has released their esteemed 2015 Mid-Year eDiscovery and Information Law Update.skyrocket In a section dedicated to social media, the Gibson Dunn update reports that “the use of social media continues to proliferate in business and social contexts, and that its importance is increasing in litigation, the number of cases focusing on the discovery of social media continued to skyrocket in the first half of 2015.”

The eDiscovery update addresses key themes and several cases involving key legal issues related to social media evidence, which were previously addressed on this blog. Two key highlights cite cases affirming that mere screenshot printouts of social media evidence are not defensible and clarify overall authentication requirements in order to admit social media evidence in court.

As noted by the report “in the first half of 2015, courts continued to find that the testimony of the individual who printed a copy of a social media webpage, or prepared a memorandum summarizing information obtained from the social media account, is insufficient to authenticate social media evidence.” The report cites Linscheid v. Natus Medical Inc., 2015 WL 1470122, at *5-6 (N.D. Ga. Mar. 30, 2015) (finding LinkedIn profile page not authenticated by declaration from individual who printed the page from the Internet); Monet v. Bank of America, N.A., 2015 WL 1775219, at *8 (Cal Ct. App. Apr. 16, 2015) (finding that a “memorandum by an unnamed person about representations others made on Facebook is at least double hearsay” and not authenticated).

The Report also cited “a major shift” in case law concerning the authentication of social media evidence. The Court of Appeals of Maryland determined that “in order to authenticate evidence derived from a social networking website, the trial judge must determine that there is proof from which a reasonable juror could find that the evidence is what the proponent claims it to be.”  Sublet v. State, 113 A.3d 695, 698, 718, 722 (Md. 2015) (citing U.S. v. Vayner, 769 F.3d 125 (2d Cir. 2014)). Previously in Maryland, social media evidence was admissible only if the judge was “convince[d] . . . that the social media post was not falsified or created by another user.”  Griffin v. State, 19 A.3d 415 (Md. 2011).

Under Sublet, the preliminary determination of authentication is made by the trial judge and is a “context–specific determination” based on proof that “may be direct or circumstantial.” Id. at 715 (citing Vayner). The court noted that “[t]he standard articulated in Vayner … is utilized by other federal and State courts addressing authenticity of social media communications and postings.”

These cases cited by Gibson Dunn illustrate why best practices software is needed to properly collect and preserve social media evidence. Ideally, a proponent of the evidence can rely on uncontroverted direct testimony from the creator of the web page in question. In many cases, such as in the Vayner case where incriminating social media evidence is at issue, that option is not available. In such situations, the testimony of the examiner who preserved the social media or other Internet evidence “in combination with circumstantial indicia of authenticity (such as the dates and web addresses), would support a finding” that the website documents are what the proponent asserts. Perfect 10, Inc. v. Cybernet Ventures, Inc. (C.D.Cal.2002) 213 F.Supp.2d 1146, 1154. (emphasis added) (See also, Lorraine v. Markel American Insurance Company, 241 F.R.D. 534, 546 (D.Md. May 4, 2007) (citing Perfect 10, and referencing MD5 hash values as an additional element of potential “circumstantial indicia” for authentication of electronic evidence).

One of the many benefits of X1 Social Discovery is its ability to preserve and display all the available “circumstantial indicia” or “additional confirming circumstances,” in order to present the best case possible for the authenticity of social media evidence collected with the software. This includes collecting all available metadata and generating a MD5 checksum or “hash value” of the preserved data for verification of the integrity of the evidence. It is important to collect and preserve social media posts and general web pages in a thorough manner with best-practices technology specifically designed for litigation purposes.  For instance, there are over twenty unique metadata fields associated with individual Facebook posts and messages. Any one of those entries, or a combination of them contrasted with other entries, can provide unique circumstantial evidence that can establish foundational proof of authorship.

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