Tag Archives: litigation

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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July 31, 2025 · 9:58 AM

X1 Achieves Record Growth as Numerous Fortune 500 Companies Standardize on X1 Enterprise

By Larry Gill

X1 Discovery is having a record-breaking year, with dozens of Fortune 500 companies and leading law firms adopting the X1 Enterprise Platform to transform how they approach eDiscovery collection, early case assessment, and information governance. In an era when overcollection and skyrocketing legal costs strain corporate budgets, these organizations are choosing X1 to gain immediate insight into their data, dramatically reduce costs, and ensure defensible, repeatable processes—all while maintaining complete control over their information. This surge in adoption reflects X1’s position as the industry’s trusted solution for modern, efficient, and targeted enterprise eDiscovery.

The X1 Enterprise Platform is an industry-leading eDiscovery and information governance solution that empowers organizations to search, identify, analyze, and act on their data in-place, wherever it resides. X1 uniquely addresses Microsoft 365—including robust Teams support—laptops, file servers, and other cloud and on-premises sources, giving legal and compliance teams unparalleled reach and control. Dozens of major enterprises and AM Law 100 firms have now standardized on X1, recognizing it as the most effective solution for managing M365 content—often outperforming even Purview Premium—while also covering on-premises data sources seamlessly. By enabling a highly targeted, efficient, index-in-place approach, X1 provides immediate, pre-collection visibility, streamlining search, analysis, remediation, and collection workflows like never before.

Here are the top three reasons why leading organizations are adopting X1 Enterprise in record numbers:

  1. Significant Return on Investment
    Corporate legal departments that implement X1 consistently realize up to 90% in “hard” cost savings. X1’s powerful in-place search and pre-collection filtering enable teams to collect only what is needed, achieve true proportionality, and eliminate massive outsourced processing and project management fees. Many organizations are even scaling back or eliminating costly Purview Premium licenses altogether, all while mitigating risk with a defensible and repeatable collection process.
  2. Unmatched Speed and Scalability
    X1 delivers speed and scalability that no other solution can match. It can search across thousands of laptops and multiple terabytes of M365 or file share data within minutes, quickly pinpointing responsive data for precise collection or remediation. All indexed data stays securely behind the corporate firewall or in a private cloud. Unlike legacy tools that overpromise and underdeliver, X1 is proven to work and scale as advertised, backed by real-world case studies and customer success stories.
  3. Multiple Use Cases Beyond eDiscovery
    Beyond eDiscovery, corporate legal and compliance teams leverage X1 to locate and remediate sensitive personal information (PII), defensibly purge redundant or non-compliant data, support due diligence and data separation during M&A transactions, and handle GDPR Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs) and other data privacy obligations—making X1 a true multipurpose platform for enterprise information governance.

In today’s data-driven world, X1 Enterprise is more than a solution—it’s a strategic advantage. For organizations serious about controlling eDiscovery costs, reducing risk, and gaining immediate insight into their data, X1 is the clear choice.

Interested in learning more about how to dramatically reduce your costs and compliance risks? Schedule a briefing today at sales@x1.com or visit www.x1.com/solutions/x1-enterprise-platform.

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Filed under Authentication, Cloud Data, Corporations, Cybersecurity, Data Audit, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, GDPR, Information Access, Information Governance, m365, MS Teams, OneDrive, Preservation & Collection, SharePoint

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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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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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Filed under Best Practices, Cloud Data, Corporations, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, law firm, m365

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