Advanced eDiscovery with Office 365

Advanced eDiscovery is a component of Office 365 E5 subscriptions, which were introduced in Dec. 2015. Advanced eDiscovery integrates services acquired from Equivio with the existing eDiscovery features in Exchange, SharePoint, and Office 365. Advanced eDiscovery uses machine learning to make eDiscovery less expensive by reducing the volume of data lawyers must review. Although Microsoft is now providing an expanded set of eDiscovery services, any requirement to work with both online and on-premises data, as well as with data from third parties such as social media services, complicates the process.

Reducing the Cost of eDiscovery

Discovery and eDiscovery can be expensive and time consuming for all parties because lawyers must review any relevant information before it is provided to the other parties. (For definitions of “discovery” and “eDiscovery,” see the sidebar “Discovery and eDiscovery“.) This data review is expensive because lawyers must perform the review, reviewing data can be time consuming as a lawyer can review only a few complex or long documents per hour, and there may be hundreds of documents needing review.