November 19, 2024 · 11:47 AM

Industry Experts Address Information Governance Challenges in Microsoft 365

By John Patzakis

Successful information governance in a Microsoft 365 environment can be extremely challenging. Organizations require ways to operationalize their compliance processes, in order to effectively address their information governance use cases, such as PCI compliance, ROT, Data separation, and GDPR. However, Microsoft’s Purview eDiscovery platform is a very expensive add-on to M365 that does not scale to the data throughput requirements of a typical information governance project.

This is because M365 is a massive data ocean that is not purpose-built for compliance and eDiscovery, and so a new “compliance index” must be created with data carved out of the M365 ocean to initiate an eDiscovery or compliance case in Purview eDiscovery to ensure proper and complete content indexing. As a result of this disjointed two-step process, users are encountering significant problems with low throughput and defensibility. Many customers report to us that Microsoft Purview Premium’s documented inability  to handle anything other than small matters due to their 2GB per hour throughput limit. A matter involving 100 custodians at 10GB of M365 data would take several weeks to complete with Microsoft Purview Premium.

Last week X1 hosted a webinar with industry leaders Randy Kahn and Chas Meier to discuss information governance challenges in an M365 environment. Kahn outlined information governance principles and priorities in general and then emphasized how technical automation is essential to enforce and execute on any implemented information governance policies and procedures.

Kahn’s overview segued into Meier’s discussion and demonstration on how the X1 Enterprise Platform is the best solution available for managing M365 data sources as well as on-premises sources like laptops and file shares. Meier highlighted recent case studies involving large-scale projects where X1 was able to search and analyze terabytes of M365 information very accurately and in a fraction of the time required for other means, including Microsoft Purview.

Meier explained how the X1 Enterprise platform’s unique architecture allows it to index nearly ten times the daily volume compared to Purview or other competitive “connector” technologies. X1’s patented distributed micro-index-in-place architecture, combined with horizontal scaling, makes X1 the only solution capable of handling rapid indexing, identification, searching, and remediation of massive data sets in the terabytes across M365 sources, including modern attachments and inactive mailboxes. Additionally, X1 effectively addresses both cloud and on-premises data sources in a unified manner, including distributed endpoints, network file shares, and multiple M365 services like Mail, OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint.

A copy of the webinar recording can be accessed HERE.

For companies navigating complex information governance and eDiscovery requirements, including those involving M365, the  X1 Enterprise Platform ensures compliance while protecting privacy. By implementing X1 Enterprise, organizations can not only reduce costs and save valuable time but also gain a strategic advantage in managing their information governance needs. We invite you to explore how X1 can transform your data management processes and help you stay ahead in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

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Filed under Best Practices, Corporations, ECA, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, GDPR, Information Governance, m365, Preservation & Collection

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October 29, 2024 · 10:54 AM

Microsoft Copilot Explains Why X1 Search is Far Better than Windows Search

By Chas Meier

We’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Copilot, Microsoft’s generative AI chat bot. So, we asked Copilot the following prompt:

“Is X1 Search better than the standard Windows Search?

Here is Copilot’s reply in full:

“Yes, X1 Search offers many advantages over standard Windows Search, especially if you’re dealing with large volumes of documents and emails. It integrates with multiple data sources, provides faster and more efficient searches, and offers advanced filtering and preview options that standard Windows Search lacks. For someone in your line of work, X1 Search could be a real game-changer.”

Intrigued, we explored further:

“What are the advantages of X1 search over standard Windows search?

Copilot:

“Great question! Here are some key advantages of X1 Search over standard Windows Search:

  1. Unified Search Across Multiple Data Sources: X1 Search can search across emails, documents, local files, cloud storage (like Google Drive, OneDrive, Box), and even archived emails. Windows Search, on the other hand, is limited to your local files and doesn’t integrate as seamlessly with cloud services.
  2. Speed and Efficiency: X1 Search uses advanced indexing and fast-as-you-type search capabilities, allowing you to find information almost instantly. Windows Search can be slower, especially when dealing with large volumes of data.
  3. Advanced Filtering and Preview Options: X1 Search offers powerful filtering options, keyword highlighting, and full fidelity previews of documents and emails without needing to open them fully. This makes it easier to quickly identify relevant information. Windows Search lacks these advanced features.
  4. Integration with Email and Collaboration Tools: X1 Search integrates deeply with email clients like Outlook and Microsoft Teams, allowing you to search through emails, attachments, chats, and more. Windows Search doesn’t offer this level of integration.
  5. Cloud Data Search: X1 Search can index and search data stored in cloud repositories like Google Drive, OneDrive, and Box, which Windows Search doesn’t support.
  6. User Friendly Interface: X1 Search provides a simple, unified interface with over 50 refine columns, making it easy to navigate and find exactly what you need. Windows Search’s interface is more basic and less intuitive.

Does this help clarify the advantages for you?”

Yes, it does! Thank you, Microsoft Copilot! We could not have said it any better.

X1 Search is available for individual purchase on the X1 website and large volume, enterprise purchase by contacting X1 at sales@x1.com. To learn more about X1 Search visit  www.x1.com/solutions/x1-search.

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Filed under Best Practices, Business Productivity Search, Cloud Data, Corporations, Desktop Search, eDiscovery, Enterprise eDiscovery, Enterprise Search, ESI, Google Workspace, Hybrid Search, Information Access, Information Management, m365, MS Teams, OneDrive, productivity, SharePoint, X1 Search 9

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October 17, 2024 · 1:59 PM

Dale vs. Deutsche Telekom AG Illustrates the Importance of Effective ECA to Attain Proportionality

By John Patzakis

In Dale v. Deutsche Telekom AG, No. 22 C 3189 (N.D. Ill. Oct. 4, 2024), a class-action antitrust litigation stemming from the 2020 merger between T-Mobile and Sprint, the Court denied the plaintiffs’ motion to expand a proposed custodian list from fifty custodians to sixty, including three in-house attorneys. The court stated that adding the additional custodians would be “out of proportion to the needs of the case.”

Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Cole began the order by quoting Vakharia v. Swedish Covenant Hosp.: “The discovery rules are not a ticket to an unlimited, never-ending exploration of every conceivable matter that captures an attorney’s interest. Parties are entitled to a reasonable opportunity to investigate the facts—and no more.” He also added: “The inescapable reality is that discovery has come to dominate civil litigation…Proportionality, like other concepts, it is not self-defining; it requires a common sense and experiential assessment…In other words, all are agreed that discovery has gotten out of hand over the years and needs to be reigned in.”

The Court’s opinion detailed the ill-fated negotiations between the parties, with a key take-away being the lack of visibility Deutsche Telekom’s in-house counsel had into their own custodians’ data, which stymied their ability to effectively eliminate guess work and limit the number of custodians. This case illustrates that while there is a keen awareness of proportionality in the legal community, realizing the benefits requires the ability to operationalize workflows as far upstream in the eDiscovery process as possible. For instance, when you are engaging in data over-collection, which in turn incurs extensive labor and processing costs, the ship has largely sailed before you are able to perform early case assessments and data relevancy analysis, as much of the discovery costs have already been incurred at that point. The case law and the Federal Rules provide that the duty to preserve only applies to potentially relevant information, but unless you have the right operational processes in place, you are losing out on the ability to attain the benefits of proportionality.

However, traditional eDiscovery services typically involve manual collection, followed by manual on-premises hardware-based processing, and finally manual upload to review. These inefficiencies extend projects by often weeks while dramatically increasing cost and risk with purposeful data over-collection and dozens of manual data handoffs. The good news is that solutions and processes addressing the first half of the EDRM involving collection and processing are now far more automated.

To accomplish the goals of gaining early visibility into your data to foster more intelligent early case assessment, informed discovery negotiations with opposing counsel, and targeted, proportional data collection, corporate legal department should utilize index and search in-place technology. Indexing and search in-place in this context means that a software-based indexing technology (as opposed to an expensive and cumbersome stand-alone hardware appliance) is deployed directly onto the laptop, file server or in the cloud for Microsoft 365 data sources. This indexing occurs without a bulk data transfer of the data. Once indexed, you can search through terabytes of information in seconds, with complex Boolean operators, metadata filters and regular expression searches. Legal teams can iterate and repeat their searches without limitation, which is critical for large data sets.

These capabilities supporting targeted and proportional collection of loose files, emails, and large network file shares and M365 are uniquely provided in the X1 Enterprise Platform.

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Filed under Best Practices, Case Law, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, Information Governance, m365, Preservation & Collection, proportionality

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September 11, 2024 · 12:36 PM

Three Key eDiscovery Lessons from Domus BWW Funding v. Arch Insurance Company

By John Patzakis

Domus BWW Funding v. Arch Insurance Company is a recent decision focused mostly on issues and challenges related to preservation of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) in a large enterprise. It is an instructive case for in-house counsel, as it demonstrates how avoidable eDiscovery failures can lead to potentially devastating court sanctions.

Case Background

In Domus BWW Funding, LLC v. Arch Insurance Company (decided August 12, 2024), Plaintiffs brought an insurance coverage claim against Arch Insurance for defense costs related to an underlying civil matter. In its first eDiscovery failing, Arch Insurance did not issue a litigation hold until four years after having constructive notice of the claim.

Employees at Arch Insurance identified relevant ESI, but due to what the court identified as a lack of supervision by counsel, critical potential evidence was mishandled. Arch Insurance’s In-house counsel did not follow up with the paralegal tasked with executing an ESI search, the parameters of which both parties agreed to. Additionally, Arch Insurance inadvertently deleted key emails during a data migration in the summer of 2023.

The Court criticized Arch Insurance’s handling of the ESI search, describing the delay as indicative of “counsel’s disdain” for its discovery obligations. The Court found Arch Insurance’s actions caused prejudice to the Plaintiffs in the form of delays, costs and lost evidence, justifying sanctions under Rule 37(e)(1). The Court ruled that the Plaintiff could introduce evidence of Arch Insurance’s eDiscovery failures at trial and would issue a jury instruction as an evidentiary sanction.

There are three key takeaways from this case:

1. Arch Insurance’s Main Failing was Lacking an Established eDiscovery Process.

Arch Insurance’s challenges centered on its complete lack of an existing process to address eDiscovery preservation. Arch Insurance and their counsel failed to issue a timely legal hold. And when the collection did finally occur, it was highly reactive, haphazard, resulted in inadvertent destruction of ESI, and required the manual efforts of custodians because Arch Insurance had no enterprise-capable collection capability.

Having an established and demonstrable eDiscovery process will not only reduce costs and risk, but it will also demonstrate to the court that your organization takes its eDiscovery obligations seriously. And this case shows that a lack of established eDiscovery process will leave the court with the opposite impression.

2. Court Faults Arch Insurance’s Unsupervised Manual Collection

Arch Insurance improperly relied on custodians to collect ESI without attorney supervision. Courts have repeatedly criticized this practice. (See E.E.O.C. v. M1 5100 Corp., (S.D. Fla. July 2, 2020), district court excoriates defense counsel for allowing the practice of unsupervised custodian ESI self-collection, declaring that the practice “greatly troubles and concerns the court.”)

This again is a symptom of a lack of established eDiscovery process. Without a clear workflow with automated reporting, tracking, transparency and technical execution, it is difficult for attorneys to effectively supervise such a disjointed and ad-hoc exercise.

3. Arch Insurance Failed to Take Advantage of a Targeted Search

While the parties stipulated to a targeted and proportional keyword search protocol to identify and collect potentially relevant ESI, Arch Insurance lacked an enterprise capability to execute such a search. Properly targeted preservation initiatives are favored by the courts and enabled by next generation software to search data sources quickly and effectively in-place throughout the enterprise. The ability to collect data directly and transparently from custodian laptops, desktops, Microsoft 365 and other cloud sources into a RelativityOne / Relativity workspace is a game-changer that enables Attorney’s to begin review in hours rather than weeks.  But without such a capability, an organization must revert to manual efforts that either result in costly data over-collection or faulty, non-defensible effort.

In sum, Domus BWW Funding is an illustration of what often happens when an organization does not have a systematic eDiscovery process in place. An effective process is established through the right people, processes and technology, such as the capabilities of the X1 Enterprise Platform. X1 Enterprise Platform significantly streamlines the eDiscovery workflow with targeted, in-place search and collection with direct upload to a review platform, thereby significantly reducing costs and risk, allowing in-house counsel to demonstrate to the court that they take their discovery obligations seriously.

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August 27, 2024 · 10:36 AM

Addressing Critical Information Governance Challenges from Departing Employees

By John Patzakis and Chas Meier

When employees leave an organization, they often leave behind a significant amount of valuable information. This poses major information governance challenges, as companies must decide how to manage litigation holds and retain essential data assets.

A common response to this challenge is to retain departed employees’ laptops, hard drives, or keep their Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace accounts active. However, this approach is both expensive and inefficient. Another often-used method is creating a full disk image of the laptop for archiving. While this preserves data, it is a slow and cumbersome process that can require vast amounts of storage, sometimes reaching petabytes, which becomes both costly and unwieldy. Neither approach offers the ability to gain insights from the data, nor do they allow for intelligent and targeted data extraction, making it difficult to leverage these data assets effectively or comply with legal and regulatory requirements.

To address these challenges, X1 has developed a game-changing workflow utilizing our X1 Enterprise Platform, offering a streamlined and cost-effective solution. With our platform, organizations can process hundreds of laptops and Microsoft 365 accounts in a single day. Leveraging X1’s unique and patented in-place indexing technology, data extraction becomes highly targeted, allowing for efficient responses to litigation holds. This means that each litigation scenario can have a tailored search applied across all relevant data sources simultaneously, enabling precise data extraction.

For example, one company with over two dozen active litigation holds has employed X1’s solution, allowing them to save detailed keyword search routines crafted by their counsel. These searches can be quickly and programmatically applied not only to data on specific laptops but also to archived PSTs and associated Microsoft 365 accounts. Once the targeted data is extracted, the company repurposes the laptops for new employees, resulting in significant cost savings—estimated to be in the millions—and a reduction in storage requirements.

Beyond managing litigation holds, another core benefit of X1’s solution is its ability to extract key data assets from departed employees to retain within the company’s knowledge base. This capability is especially valuable for law firms, consulting firms, and organizations that rely heavily on high-end knowledge professionals. For instance, one law firm uses X1’s workflow to rapidly search large, archived PST files from departed attorneys to identify and separate key data related to ongoing matters. This ensures that crucial information remains accessible to the firm or is appropriately transferred to the attorney’s new firm. Additionally, vital legal and business insights from retained documents and emails are quickly mined and reviewed, enhancing the firm’s overall knowledge management.

Client Example:
• Overview: A major pharmaceutical retailer uses X1 within Relativity to perform 50 data collections weekly, covering both Mac and PC environments. The system allows them to repurpose laptops from departed employees within days instead of months, leading to substantial savings.
• Integration: The company eliminated the need for traditional eDiscovery tools to remediate laptops, opting instead for X1’s more efficient approach.
• Time and Cost Savings: This shift has saved the company millions by:
1. Reducing the reliance on costly traditional eDiscovery tools.
2. Minimizing the risk and cost associated with retaining unnecessary data.
3. Reintroducing millions of dollars’ worth of computer equipment back into circulation.
4. Completing these processes in one-tenth the time it would have traditionally taken, vastly improving operational efficiency.

Conclusion:
In today’s fast-paced and data-driven world, organizations face numerous challenges when it comes to managing and retaining data from departed employees. Traditional methods, such as retaining physical devices or creating full disk images, are not only costly and time-consuming but also fail to provide the flexibility and insight needed to effectively manage information assets. X1’s innovative solutions, particularly its patented in-place indexing technology, offer a modern, scalable, and efficient alternative. By enabling targeted data extraction, streamlining the process for litigation holds, and supporting knowledge retention, X1 empowers organizations to manage data governance with precision and agility.

For companies navigating complex data environments, especially those utilizing BYOD policies, X1 Enterprise Platform ensures compliance while protecting privacy. By implementing X1’s advanced platform, organizations can not only reduce costs and save valuable time but also gain a strategic advantage in managing their information governance needs. We invite you to explore how X1 can transform your data management processes and help you stay ahead in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

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