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:
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.
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.
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.
Corporate legal departments face ever-increasing costs and risk related to eDiscovery, driven largely by excessive and indiscriminate data collection. Many organizations default to an overbroad “collect everything” approach out of an abundance of caution or due to inefficient workflows imposed by third-party service providers or even outside counsel. Over collection results in far higher costs upstream, critical delays and increased risk. However, for this reason courts consistently endorse proportional and targeted discovery practices that balance the needs of litigation with cost-effectiveness and reasonableness. But in order to best realize the benefits of proportionality, organizations should establish an in-house eDiscovery capability supported by best-practices technology.
Courts Support Proportional and Targeted ESI Collection The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) emphasize proportionality and reasonableness in discovery. Specifically, Rule 26(b)(1) limits discovery to information that is relevant to any party’s claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case.
Courts have routinely upheld this principle, encouraging parties to avoid overbroad collections:
The Sedona Conference Principles While not binding, courts frequently rely on The Sedona Principles, which advocate for “reasonable and good faith efforts” to identify relevant ESI. (See The Sedona Principles, Third Edition, 19 Sedona Conf. J. 1 (2018)). Courts cite these principles to support reasonable limits on preservation and collection.
In re Bard IVC Filters Prods. Liab. Litig., 317 F.R.D. 562 (D. Ariz. 2016) Here, the court recognized the proportionality limits of Rule 26(b)(1) and ruled that the defendant’s proposed targeted discovery approach—using custodians, date ranges, and agreed-upon search terms—satisfied its obligations.
Oxbow Carbon & Minerals LLC v. Union Pacific Railroad Co., 322 F.R.D. 1 (D.D.C. 2017) The court rejected broad discovery requests that lacked proportionality, holding that the producing party could limit its search for ESI to agreed-upon custodians and relevant date ranges. The court emphasized that broad, burdensome demands are contrary to Rule 26(b)(1).
Hernandez v. City of Houston, No. 4:16-CV-3577, 2020 WL 2542625 (S.D. Tex. May 19, 2020) Here, the court denied a motion to compel additional production of ESI beyond agreed search terms, explaining that the requested expansion was disproportionate given the marginal relevance and substantial burden of additional collection.
These and other decisions (further analysis available here) demonstrate that targeted, proportional collection efforts are not only defensible but expected by the courts. Overcollection is hardly mandated by the court and, in fact, can increase risk by preserving irrelevant or privileged information unnecessarily.
So, the problem is not the law. The challenge is that many eDiscovery service providers favor full disk imaging or other forms of massive data over-collection for two reasons: 1) As they are not integrated into a company’s IT data architecture with an established and repeatable process, they revert to a reactive, once-off effort to collect everything that could possibly be relevant; and 2) They are financially incentivized to collect as much data as possible.
Advantages of In-House eDiscovery Capabilities for Targeted Collections To align with the principles of proportionality, legal departments should move away from the outsourced collection model that favors bulk extraction. Instead, maintaining an in-house eDiscovery capability provides the following key advantages:
Integrated, Precise Search and Collection Solutions like X1 Enterprise are designed to index data in place, allowing corporate legal and IT teams to search, cull, and collect only what is relevant—without moving massive volumes of unnecessary data. This reduces costs and minimizes data exposure.
Iterative, Defensible Process With in-house capabilities, legal teams can collaborate directly with IT to conduct collections iteratively. They can refine search criteria and custodians in real-time, in response to case developments or meet-and-confer negotiations, ensuring defensibility and responsiveness.
Faster Response Times and Lower Costs Deeply integrated technology removes reliance on expensive, reactive third-party vendors who often require full data exports up front. By indexing data where it resides, in-house teams can respond quickly to litigation holds and discovery deadlines.
Enhanced Compliance and Risk Management By avoiding massive data dumps, corporations reduce the risk of producing irrelevant, privileged, or sensitive data unnecessarily. Proportionality helps mitigate privacy risks and comply with data minimization principles under privacy laws like the GDPR and CCPA.
Control and Repeatability Across Multiple Use Cases In-house solutions preserve institutional knowledge and workflows. Future cases can reuse workflows and search parameters, creating repeatable, consistent, and auditable processes. Further, the same process can be readily leveraged for various information governance and other compliance use cases.
Conclusion Courts expect discovery to be proportional, targeted, and reasonable—not excessive or indiscriminate. Establishing an in-house eDiscovery capability with proven integrated technology like X1 Enterprise allows your organization to operationalize this legal standard. By doing so, you will reduce costs, minimize risks, and demonstrate good faith compliance with discovery obligations.
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.
Are you tired of wasting hours each week fruitlessly searching across emails, documents, cloud services, and local drives? You’re not alone. Law firms and major enterprises are increasingly recognizing the inherent limitations of legacy enterprise search solutions and turning decisively toward X1 Search.
X1 Search delivers a revolutionary user-based search experience that dramatically boosts productivity. Demand for X1 Search has skyrocketed this year—one major federal agency is expanding from 20,000 to over 40,000 licenses to equip every employee. Nearly half of AMLAW 100 firms now deploy or are actively considering X1. Why this rapid shift?
Traditional enterprise search solutions are fundamentally broken in today’s hybrid-cloud enterprise landscape. They rely heavily on outdated architectures that require mass data duplication and centralization—approaches rendered obsolete by remote work and distributed platforms such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Specifically, traditional tools face:
Scalability Roadblocks: Centralizing terabytes of distributed unstructured data is now effectively impossible in the modern enterprise.
Incompatibility with Modern Platforms: Legacy systems struggle to integrate effectively with platforms like Microsoft 365 due to restrictive APIs and loss of security permissions when the data is copied and exported en masse.
Regulatory and Governance Challenges: Mass duplication of sensitive data violates critical data protection regulations and contradicts fundamental information governance principles. The GDPR specifically mandates data minimization, particularly when viable alternative technologies exist, as evaluated through a Data Privacy Impact Analysis (DPIA).
Employees in modern organizations effectively have two viable search options: the limited native Windows search or the robust, efficient capabilities of X1 Search. Microsoft Copilot itself recently highlighted X1 Search’s advantages:
“X1 Search offers advanced indexing, instant search-as-you-type capabilities, powerful filtering, keyword highlighting, and document/email previews, significantly surpassing standard Windows Search. Moreover, X1 seamlessly searches across emails, documents, cloud storage, archived data, and more—far beyond Windows Search capabilities.”
X1 Search introduces an entirely new, distributed search architecture uniquely suited to today’s enterprise environments: • Distributed Micro-Indexing: Patented technology ensures secure, permission-aligned indexing, granting employees immediate, secure access to authorized data only. • No Mass Data Duplication: Interact directly with original documents without unnecessary duplication, ensuring compliance and efficiency. • True Federated Search: Search instantly and iteratively across M365, Google Workspace, Slack, and local data sources within a single unified search field—a capability unmatched by any other solution.
The latest X1 Search transcends desktop limitations, instantly searching Microsoft Email, Teams, Slack, OneDrive, SharePoint, local files, and now Google Drive and Gmail, all from one intuitive interface. This empowers users to reclaim hours each day, dramatically boosting productivity.
X1 Search’s intuitive design has won over 500,000 loyal users worldwide. As Max Underwood, from a top defense contracting firm, puts it:
“X1 Search is my go-to, must-have application. Nothing matches its speed and accuracy in helping me find precisely what I need, exactly when I need it.”
Stop Searching. Start Finding. Traditional search solutions are holding your business back. It’s time to break free and discover why top law firms and enterprises are standardizing on X1 Search.
Take the next step today: • Individual users: Purchase directly from our website. • Enterprise licenses: Contact us at sales@x1.com to start the conversation. Learn more at www.x1.com/solutions/x1-search/ and join the growing ranks of productive, satisfied X1 Search users today.
Microsoft reports 345 million paid users worldwide of its Microsoft 365 platform (“M365”), spanning over two million companies, with more than one million of them based in the United States. M365’s cloud-based data sources such as OneDrive, Outlook mail, Teams and SharePoint online represent arguably the majority of ESI being produced in litigation going forward. However, M365 presents significant eDiscovery challenges and costs, requiring legal and eDiscovery professionals to be aware of the various methods to address this critical data source.
This article briefly addresses the benefits and challenges of each of the three main approaches to addressing eDiscovery and information governance in M365: 1) Utilizing Microsoft Purview; 2) Outsourced Services; or 3) Relying on a 3rd Party Purpose-build eDiscovery Solution.
Microsoft Purview Microsoft Purview is the built-in M365 eDiscovery tool. It comes in different licensing tiers, the highest and most useful being Premium, or also known as E5 licenses. A key benefit of utilizing Purview Premium is that it’s integrated with M365, which is obviously convenient for workflow and also budgeting. Purview features a good legal hold process that allows the application of legal holds in place for key M365 data sources.
There is also a good consultant ecosystem to provide training and add-on services, which are often needed to address the larger projects at extra cost. And a premium license provides other functionalities unrelated to eDiscovery such as data analytics for business as well as a lot of security functions.
As far as the challenges of MS Purview Premium that we hear from users, a common complaint is that it can be very expensive, with licenses costing about $600 per employee annually. For large cases, licenses for several thousand custodians run in the millions of dollars and well into the tens of millions when you are dealing with a company with about 40,000 employees.
But the biggest complaint that we hear is that it’s not suited for large cases, M365 is built for user productivity, and the shared architecture is designed to support hundreds of millions of global users with normal individual workloads. eDiscovery and information governance projects are very large and aberrant workloads, so the system is designed to throttle large data throughputs. For instance, when you start a case in Purview, a separate and new index is created to allow eDiscovery and compliance searches in Purview, but there is a 2 GB hourly limit when creating this index — according to Microsoft’s own documentation — which limits your ability to address larger cases in a timely manner. There are many documented concerns about the accuracy and transparency of search results and data exports, especially as cases get bigger and there’s more custodians with higher volumes. Also, large attachments over 150 mb are not being a supported, as well as many filetypes such as engineering files like CAD drawings. MS only supports 50 file types, while the right eDiscovery software will support over 500.
These search accuracy and throughput limitations were called out by a Special Master Phillip Favro in the case of Deal Genius, LLC v. O2COOL, LLC, No. 21-C-2046, 2022 WL 17418933, at *1–2 (N.D. Ill. Oct. 24, 2022), and further expounded upon by Favro is his recent technical whitepaper:
“Purview eDiscovery does not provide the advanced features offered by a full service e-discovery platform needed to support discovery efforts in complex cases such as multidistrict litigation and class actions or regulatory investigations like Hart-Scott-Rodino Second Requests. Even small lawsuits that involve high volumes of ESI can present difficulties for organizations that wish to manage much of their discovery process with Purview eDiscovery. Responding parties that rely on Purview eDiscovery may not be able to perform a comprehensive search to reasonably identify relevant information. Responding parties who wish to incorporate Purview eDiscovery functionality into their discovery workflows must understand its search limitations and take steps to address them so they can establish the defensibility of their discovery process.” “Microsoft Purview eDiscovery: Key Features and Limitations,” Practical Law (July 2024).
Finally, Purview only addresses data within 365. It’s not going to address data sources such as Slack, or on-premises sources including laptops, fileshares, even on prem exchange or on-Prem SharePoint.
Outsourced Services The second approach to addressing M365 for eDiscovery is to retain an outsourced service provider. There are well over 100 consulting firms that perform such services, and the main benefit is that the right consultants can get the job done. The consultants know how to export M365 data into a standard eDiscovery workflow, are very good at project management, and are well-versed with working with attorneys and their litigation deadlines. For companies that are smaller without the internal resources or expertise or have backlogs, this can be a good approach.
The main drawback is that it can be very expensive, because often times what we generally see is the service providers parachute in and run very basic scripts to conduct a mass data export from M365. After that, it defaults to a traditional eDiscovery workflow with processing tools, a lot of manual services, and then an upload to a standard review platform. This reactive approach results in a high amount of expensive data overcollection. Additionally, outsourced service providers typically require very high level, super-admin privileges in order to run their bulk data download scripts, which can be a significant concern from a security standpoint. These privileges can be delegated sometimes without the company’s knowledge, so it is important to be aware of and audit the privileges that are being granted.
Also, we have seen that for large eDiscovery collection projects in Europe, EU based companies are required to perform a data protection impact analysis (DPIA), and mass bulk collections involving copying of all the employees’ emails and other sensitive files and taking that data offsite are frowned upon by privacy auditors. That approach runs afoul of the GDPR’s proportionality and data minimalization requirements.
Third Party eDiscovery Software Solution And finally, a third approach is utilizing a non-Microsoft eDiscovery solution that’s purpose- built to conduct eDiscovery, including by connecting to M365. A benefit of this approach is that the right solution can scale for larger data sets. This is particularly important for information governance projects such as data compliance audits. The good solutions will not require expensive Premium Purview licensing for every custodian and will enable you to employ it as an established and repeatable process. It can also address the indexing throughput and completeness challenges in Purview. And finally, a platform like this should be able to support data outside of M365 such as on-premises sources or data such as Slack.
One of the challenges of an in-house system is that internal IT resources or tech savvy paralegals are needed to run the process. Some technology platforms still require you to have the most expensive Purview Premium licensing to support essential functionality, such as collection of hyper-linked documents, and other key features. Further, many of these vendors are simply providing repurposed email archiving platforms, which function by a mass copy and transfer of all the organization’s data in M365. This poses significant logistical challenges in terms of scalability, not to mention unnecessary cost. M365 does not easily allow for the mass data download, which can lead to errors and data corruption, as in the recent case of FTC v. Match Group, No. 3:19-CV-2281-K, 2025 WL 46024, at *4 (N.D. Tex. Jan. 7, 2025) where MS Purview exports to an email archival system failed, resulting in court imposed discovery sanctions. So, if the solution does not allow for index in place functionality, but a bulk download, copy and data transfer, then there can be significant challenges with that approach.
The X1 Enterprise platform for 365 and on-premises sources takes a unique approach with a micro indexing architecture so that each data source and each custodian is associated with their own index. This enables a true index in place keep capability for targeted search and analytics at the point of collection, which enables the bypassing of most of the M365 throttling issues so that hundreds of custodians can be addressed in hours, not weeks. Our customers have successfully addressed matters involving thousands of custodians and upwards of 80 terabytes of M365 data that was indexed in a very short period of time. X1 Enterprise does not require Purview Premium licensing to address all the required functionality, such as the search and collection of hyperlinked files, archived email, inactive mailboxes, as well as many other detailed requirements.
Simply put, we believe X1 Enterprise is the best solution available to address M365 data for eDiscovery and information governance requirements.
Ready to Learn More? For companies navigating complex information governance and eDiscovery requirements, including those involving M365, organizations that rely on the X1 Enterprise Platform not only reduce costs and save valuable time but also gain a strategic advantage in managing their eDiscovery and information governance needs. 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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