eDiscovery in Microsoft 365

7/16/2020

6 minutes to read

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In this article

Electronic discovery, or eDiscovery, is the process of identifying and delivering electronic information that can be used as evidence in legal cases. You can use eDiscovery tools in Microsoft 365 to search for content in Exchange Online mailboxes, Microsoft 365 Groups, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business sites, and Skype for Business conversations, and Yammer teams. You can search mailboxes and sites in the same eDiscovery search by using the Content Search tool. And you can use Core eDiscovery cases to identify, hold, and export content found in mailboxes and sites. If your organization has an Office 365 E5 or Microsoft 365 E5 subscription (or related E5 add-on subscriptions), you can further manage custodians and analyze content by using the Advanced eDiscovery solution in Microsoft 365.

Microsoft 365 provides the following eDiscovery tools:

Note Advanced eDiscovery (classic) (also called Advanced eDiscovery v1.0), which is the version of Advanced eDiscovery available in a Core eDiscovery case by clicking Switch to Advanced eDiscovery, is being retired. Its functionality has been replaced by the Advanced eDiscovery solution in Microsoft 365. For more information about the retirement of Advanced eDiscovery v1.0, see Retirement of legacy eDiscovery tools.

Content Search

The following table contains links to topics that will help you use the Content Search tool.

Core eDiscovery

The following table contains links to topics that will help you use Core eDiscovery cases. You can use Core eDiscovery cases to add eDiscovery managers who can access the case, place an eDiscovery hold on content locations relevant to the case, search for content, and export the search results from the case.

Advanced eDiscovery

The Advanced eDiscovery solution in Microsoft 365 (also called Advanced eDiscovery v2.0) builds on the existing eDiscovery and analytics capabilities in Office 365. This eDiscovery solution 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 custodians and the entire legal hold notification workflow to communicate with custodians involved in a case.

Topic Description Overview of Advanced eDiscovery This article introduces Advanced eDiscovery v2.0 and provides a high-level overview of the built-in workflow of Advanced eDiscovery and how it aligns to the eDiscovery process outlined by the Electronic Discovery Reference Model . Get started with Advanced eDiscovery Learn how to get started using Advanced eDiscovery, including the required licensing and necessary eDiscovery permission. This article shows you how to create an Advanced eDiscovery case and provides a walk-through of the Advanced eDiscovery workflow. Work with custodians Learn about working with custodians in an Advanced eDiscovery. This topic links to step-by-step instructions to add custodians to a case, managing custodians in a case, and viewing custodian activity in Microsoft 365 by searching the audit log. Work with communications Learn about managing the legal hold notification process in Advanced eDiscovery. This includes creating and automating the notification workflow and how a user acknowledged a hold notification. Work with processing errors Learn about Advanced indexing and how to remediate indexing errors in content from custodial and non-custodial content locations, such as Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint sites, and OneDrive accounts. You can bulk-remediate errors and then upload remediated files to a review set or remediate individual processing errors within a review set. Collect data for a case Learn about searching for content in custodial content locations, and then adding relevant case data to a review set. When you copy content to a review set, the data is copied from the original content locations to a Microsoft-provided Azure Storage location. This provides a static set of documents for the review process. Manage review sets Learn about reviewing case data in a review set. This includes viewing, querying, filtering, and tagging documents in a review set. Analyze data in a review set Learn about running analysis on the documents in a review set. The results of running analysis include near-duplication detection, email threading, and themes identification. Export case data Learn about exporting data from a case for external review.

Roadmap

To see what eDiscovery features have been launched, are rolling out, or in development, please visit the Microsoft 365 Roadmap.