Manage legal investigations in Microsoft 365
Tip
eDiscovery (preview) is now available in the new Microsoft Purview portal. To learn more about using the new eDiscovery experience, see Learn about eDiscovery (preview).
Organizations have many reasons to respond to a legal case involving certain executives or other employees in your organization. This might involve quickly finding and retaining for further investigation-specific information in email, documents, instant messaging conversations, and other content locations used by people in their day-to-day work tasks. You can perform these and many other similar activities by using the eDiscovery case tools in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal.
Want to know how Microsoft manages its eDiscovery investigations? Here's a technical white paper you can download that explains how we use the same search and investigation tools to manage our internal eDiscovery workflow.
Tip
If you're not an E5 customer, use the 90-day Microsoft Purview solutions trial to explore how additional Purview capabilities can help your organization manage data security and compliance needs. Start now at the Microsoft Purview trials hub. Learn details about signing up and trial terms.
Manage legal investigations with eDiscovery cases
eDiscovery cases let you control who can create, access, and manage eDiscovery cases in your organization. Use cases to add members and control what types of actions they can perform, place a hold on content locations relevant to a legal case, and use the Content Search tool to search the locations on hold for content that might be responsive to your case. Then you can also export and download those results for further investigation by external reviewers.
- Manage your eDiscovery workflow by creating and using eDiscovery cases for every legal investigation your organization has to undertake.
- Assign eDiscovery permissions to control who can create and manage eDiscovery cases in your organization.
- Set up compliance boundaries to control the user content locations that eDiscovery managers can search.
- Search for content in your organization.
Use scripts for advanced scenarios
Like the previous section that listed scripts for content search scenarios, we've also created some Security & Compliance PowerShell scripts to help you manage eDiscovery cases.
- Create a eDiscovery hold report that contains information about all holds associated with eDiscovery cases in your organization.
- Add mailboxes and OneDrive locations for a list of users to an eDiscovery hold.
Manage legal investigations with the eDiscovery (Premium) solution in Microsoft 365
The Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Premium) solution in Microsoft 365 builds on the existing eDiscovery and analytics capabilities in Office 365. This new solution, called eDiscovery (Premium), provides an end-to-end workflow to preserve, collect, review, analyze, and export content that's responsive to your organization's internal and external investigations. It also lets legal teams manage the entire legal hold notification workflow to communicate with custodians involved in a case.
eDiscovery (Premium) requires an E5 subscription for your Microsoft 365 or Office 365 organization. For more information about licensing, see Set up eDiscovery (Premium).
Here's a quick overview of the built-in workflow in eDiscovery (Premium). For more information, see Manage the eDiscovery (Premium) workflow.
- Create a case to get started.
- Manage custodians by adding them to a case and placing a legal hold on content in their mailbox, OneDrive account, and Microsoft Teams they're members of.
- Manage communications with custodians by automating the legal hold notification process.
- Index custodian data and fix indexing errors so you can effectively collect data for your investigations.
- Collect data for a case and add add it to a review set for further investigation.
- View documents, query data, and tag items in a review set.
- Analyze case data with advanced analytics tools.
- Export case data for review by outside counsel.
- Manage long-running jobs in eDiscovery (Premium).