Compliance boundary implementation should be planned carefully to avoid inadvertent omissions or unexpected public content being swept into your results. Microsoft recommends creating TWO Purview role groups. One to designate the user(s) and the second to apply the search permission filter to restrict search sources. The Learn documentation is extensive and goes beyond basic functionality. Below I have commented on a few key points.

• Search permission filters only apply to search, they cannot be used to restrict Legal Holds or Add Sources.
• Do NOT rely on AI recommendations to create a custom role that excludes the Add Sources permission. Claude and Copilot seem to be relying on legacy documentation for this recommendation and I have confirmed that the new Purview UI does not support this.
• The search permission filters are set in PowerShell by someone with both Organization Management and eDiscovery Administrator roles. This may be uncommon in least permissive security environments where these roles are PIM accounts.
• When you add the search permission filter role group to a case its filters are added to all searches as conditions. <SearchQuery> AND (<PermissionsFilter1> OR <PermissionsFilter2> OR <PermissionsFilter3>…) Maximum of 100 search conditions and extensive filter lists may impact your total query characters and performance.
• Filters are based on mailbox or site KQL searchable properties or attributes. This makes sense as it is added as a search condition in Purview eDiscovery. I strongly recommend testing your filters extensively before they are applied as changing them will remove your role group from any cases. Docs push to apply a value to a custom attribute to avoid all the potential gotchas.
• Users can still use Add Sources for targets outside of the filters. However, the filter will exclude them when the search executes. It will NOT tell you that is what it is doing. This is also why you need to test your filter scope carefully to ensure that it only applies on every appropriate target.
• By default, User scope filters using the Mailbox parameter will target the mailbox and OneDrive. HOWEVER, if you add Site content filters you will need to explicitly include custodial OneDrives as targets. This is confusing, so again test before trusting.
• If you follow the recommendations to use custom or unique properties (department, geo-region, path, etc.) you need to verify that items within the Site have those properties. Per documentation, “In SharePoint, there isn’t a “site object” with properties, like there is with Exchange mailboxes. Therefore, the Pathproperty is stamped on the document and contains the URL of the site where the document is located. This design is why a Site filter is considered a content filter and not a content location filter.” A
• Public mailboxes cannot be excluded using filters. This means that content from public mailboxes will be in scope for ‘exclusion only’ filters.

As you can see, Compliance Boundary search permission filters are powerful and complicated. They are not something that the average legal department Purview eDiscovery manager will set up on the fly to meet a priority request. They can be used for long-term departmental, regional or other scenarios requiring restrictions between teams. The silent filter mechanism holds risk of inadvertent exclusion of responsive results. They seem best suited for a limited set of very clear filters for specific users applied to dedicated long term matters. Too many filters could get confusing and quickly run into the 100 condition or total character limits in Purview searches. Test your filters well and use them to meet critical requirements rather than as an ad hoc matter/investigation solution.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com.  Reach out for a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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Many of my clients struggle to manage M365 Purview eDiscovery matters, holds and custodians. The Five Star Legal team’s eDig365 Reporter app can be purchased for $2,500/month directly from the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace. It addresses many of the management, tracking and audit pain points experienced by corporate legal teams that rely on Purview eDiscovery directly or through an integration to their eDiscovery platform like RelativityOne, Exterro, Everlaw, Reveal and others.

Functionality:

• Cross-Case Reporting: Centralized visibility across legal holds, searches, exports, and custodians.
• Search Metrics Reporting: Retain historical metrics on holds and searches.
• Custodial Data Sources: Map potential mailboxes, OneDrives, Teams and SharePoint sites that custodians own or are a member of.
• Over-held Custodian Management: Identifies individuals and locations with over-held data to reduce unnecessary exposure and costs.
• Hold Remediation: Quickly spots failed or incomplete holds with helpful context.
• Search History: Tracks search iterations, including data volumes and item counts.
• Audit Trail Tracking: Delivers readable, defensible audit trails for every case, search, and hold.
• Immutable Purview Actions: Security and compliance of user actions.

That last point is critical. Default M365 logs expire after 180 days. eDig365 offers tools to selectively report on search targets (like executive or BoD communications) and criteria to detect potential misuse of Purview’s powerful capabilities. Effectively, eDig365 gives Purview eDiscovery a memory that covers deleted searches and matters.

While you can manually navigate to see custodian groups and sites in the latest Purview UI, customers have had to rely on PowerShell scripts or custom solutions to get attorney reports of potential data sources to support hold scoping and interviews. eDig365 brings potential sources and current holds into context with reports instead of navigating each custodian and copying down their sources.

Details:

• eDig365 app, database and reports are stored within the customer Azure tenant.
• eDig365 is restricted to read-only rights and actions. It cannot alter records or data. Information access without releasing the keys to the kingdom.
• Purchase and installation is from the Azure marketplace at $2,500/month.
• The team created a configuration tool to ease the Azure managed identity registration process.
• Currently the application manages user security for access.
• SOC 2 compliant.

Many eDiscovery platforms have integrations using the Graph API to execute holds, searches and even exports to that platform. Many register these actions in the Purview eDiscovery UI. Understandably, Microsoft limits the Graph API functionality supported for external integrations. There are still things that can only be done within the tenant with PowerShell and direct access. The Five Star Legal team has leveraged the broader internal capabilities to access, normalize and present information from multiple sources for contextually integrated reports. Professionals managing hundreds of matters, holds and investigations need an indelible record to defend their process. This is another potential tool in the enterprise eDiscovery toolbox.

Briefed by:

Don Swanson

Hunter Swanson

Marshal Hagen

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com.  Reach out for a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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Rather than opine on the new offerings, I wanted to share feedback from my own AI research and vibe coding experiments. The only way to understand these systems is to use them yourself. That is how I have always kept on the cutting edge of enterprise (Purview), eDiscovery (RelativityOne) and as many of the tools as possible. Trust but verify through your own usage.

I resurrected an ancient passion project and started using precious weekend time to teach myself AI driven development on a modern environment. I am not a developer. I can kluge scripts and taught myself Cold Fusion web coding for one of my first startups. I do not consider these real development skills. A recent episode of Hardfork (Using Gemini 3 Is Here) inspired me to literally dust off a set of 1980’s notebooks filled with my poorly handwritten fiction research to see if Gemini 3.1 could convert scans into accurate text for a knowledge repository. It was fun doing glasswork scanning while watching cooking shows on the couch. Especially when I ran into ideas scrawled on HPD letterhead from my days in the crime lab (yes, I have always had some kind of startup brewing in my off hours).

Impressions from an old school geek:

• You still need to be able to read commented code to debug and tweak. But you no longer have to guess at syntax.
• AI can now guide you through the development process, especially if you are already kind of techie inclined. Ask it to interview you on your project goals and design staged prompts to get started.
• AI is insanely smart AND dumb at the same time. Verify everything. Example, Google AI Studio (Gemini) ran me in circles for hours insisting that I had to use Gemini-1.5-Pro or Flash when that version was not supported for my project or API keys. I made it write me a python snippet to generate a list of supported models from my API key to finally figure this out.
• The AI methods, calls and names are changing so fast that the coding models cannot keep up. This is similar to issues I have observed using Copilot to answer questions about Purview. It references outdated documents (or ingested training materials) and comingles answers from the legacy and modern Purview UIs.
• I was gifted a couple of great pre-prompt instructions to minimize hallucinations and put the model into ‘strictly factual’ mode. The instructions consome some query cache, but help ensure that I understand the source and the intersection of fact vs. reasoning. These are usually verbose, so you can feed your own as a prompt and ask for a model specific condensed version (use the AI against the AI).
• Speaking of AI vs. AI, feed the same prompts to multiple models for fast comparisons or the results from one model to another for evaluation.
• Free tier AI is incredibly constrained for more than simple smart search results. Worth experimenting with a couple prepaid or minimal monthly subscriptions while you are evaluating models.
• Any AI service processing actual documents or uploaded data is going to take processing time and will have request limits. Build delays and ‘cool down buffers’ into your code. This varies per model and subscription tier.
• Data Protection Agreement terms vary wildly. If you are using a public model, you should assume that anything you input may be used for training or otherwise exposed. Google’s NotebookLLM has great knowledge base features for my project, but their terms are not acceptable for real personal information or copyright purposes from a non-attorney perspective.
• My program processed 165 MB of scanned documents for 3-4 hours in the Gemini-3.1-Pro model. Much of that time was 30-60 second buffers. It output ~1.5M tokens worth of RTF files for a total cost of $4.75. Worth every penny to see the clean, formatted text with tables and even understandable diagram content.

Yes, I was always a geek and proud of it.

I hope my experiments encourage other practitioners to try vibe coding or similar AI projects. We all need to invest time (even non-billable hours) to keep up our skills sharp. Next trick is to see if Copilot (maybe using Claude) is better at generating my monthly time allocation reports. My early testing was not encouraging, but who knows now.

Circling back to the Claude for Legal integrations, I encourage everyone to ask your favorite AI to outline the documented functionality of any of the partners whose platforms you use. Here is my prompt in Researcher mode:

research recent release of Claude for Legal connectors with a focus on RelativityOne integration to outline functionality, workflows and potential content and legal workproduct exposure risk.

Start looking at low risk workflow or usage scenarios that do not involve actual eDiscovery content, strategy or work product. Relativity seems to have taken that approach for overall workspace management, reporting and similar administrative support. In contrast, Everlaw and Consilio Claude integrations involve actual content searches, classification or other higher risk functionality as Schwantes outlines in her post. So play, learn and test in responsible sandboxes before risking client confidentiality, privilege or sensitive information. I would love to hear about your experiences!

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com.  Reach out for a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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ARMOUR Autonomy Ladder

I like how Exterro’s ARMOUR Autonomy Ladder portrays their maturity evolution vision. Far too many practitioners are stuck at Level 1 with disconnected tools tracked by piecemeal spreadsheets or custom portals. They may have be experimenting with AI-assisted point products, but making the jump to agentic AI workflows requires scarce time, budget and expertise. I am seeing global consulting firms pitching massive agentic AI transformations with custom development and models that come with their own risk and overhead. I believe that these initiatives can indeed deliver time savings and risk reduction. Why reinvent the wheel if you can just buy it off the shelf? One size (or workflow) does not fit all, but I would rather innovate on an architecture that someone else has to keep updated and benefit from their broader customer base feedback to keep evolving.

If the academic/blogger moto is “Publish or Perish!” then the corporate moto may be “Evolve or become Extinct!”

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com.  Reach out for a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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“We’re investing in transparent, auditable AI-assisted workflows designed for real-world scrutiny, so teams can simplify complexity and act quickly with confidence.”-Krystal Putman-Garcia (emphasis added)

Development investments like 100+ new Legal Hold features are not sexy, but they deliver customer value. Many eDiscovery platforms implemented minimal (check-box) legal hold notifications to satisfy RFP requirements. Few circle back to build practical workflows, task management, reports, and automation. Casepoint’s new generative AI capabilities deliver natural language search, doc summarization and auto-categorization for reviews and investigations. They have also added A/V transcription, relationship mapping, and HR system connectors. They also offer a complete end-to-end FOIA solution on the same platform that leverages the power of eDiscovery and offers additional FOIA specific GenAI features. They recently achieved CMMC Level 2 cybersecurity certification on top of their FedRAMP High and DOW/DOD Il5 and IL6 authorizations, expanding their claim as the eDiscovery market leader in high security credentials.

Casepoint’s laser focus on the requirements of their target customers may not make for flashy press releases, but it does make them worth watching for your next matter or client with high security needs.

Briefed by:

Krystal Putman-Garcia – Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer, and Co-Interim CEO

Amit Dungarani – VP of Product Marketing and Revenue Enablement

Oliver Silva – VP of Product

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com.  Reach out for a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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What is Advanced Indexing and what triggers it?

When you add custodians/data sources, promote to review or export items in a Premium Purview eDiscovery matter (E5 license) the system automatically reindexes any partially indexed or errored items. It also runs OCR on images and creates indexing reports (dashboard and CSV). You can limit the reindexing to locations with existing search hits or all locations searched.

Ambient (E3) vs. Advanced (E5) index Search

Context searches (location and metadata) on in place items are identical. This supports broad custodial or location legal holds that may be refined by dates, participants, extensions or subject/file names with reasonable reliability (validate in your tenant). Content searches for terms, phrases or Boolean combinations can be used against the ambient index for investigations, scoping and QC. E3 custodians or sites with E3 members will NOT be reindexed for more reliable content searches. Items promoted to Purview Review Sets WILL be reindexed, have additional metadata and retrieve cloud attachments for export. That draws a pretty clear line between when you can use content criteria. There are add-on SKUs that will enable this functionality for custodians (all site group members required), but managing license promotions against legal holds is complicated.

Strategic workflow considerations

“Preserve broadly, collect selectively” has been the dominant eDiscovery strategy for the last decade. I have had to build metrics demonstrating the minimal impact of holds on tenant storage costs for clients recently. Immature retention and information governance practices contribute far more to storage costs than most legal holds. That being said, the pressure is on to adopt the Microsoft eDiscovery lifecycle that invests up front is defensible scoping for selective holds. The Purview eDiscovery architecture is not designed to export giant perpetual custodial mailboxes and OneDrives packed with meeting recordings. Items promoted to Review Sets create new copies in Azure, which takes time and Microsoft will eventually start charging for the storage. Depending on the request parameters and potential risk, I usually recommend broad in-place holds and prioritizing selective collections to get counsel the highest value items up front. This works with clear volume caps, short SLA times and iterative search/exports to keep counsel fed as they use their favorite platform and AI to meet the request.

Hidden Gotchas

• External platform integrations that use the Graph APIs may NOT understand the license level of targets or trigger the Advanced Indexing. Integrations such as RelativityOne that create the searches, holds and exports within Purview should trigger the reindexing or stage as a Review Set. Remember that reindexing is a process that takes time and the logs should be checked before relying on a remote system.
• As mentioned above, all Teams and SharePoint members of a site must be E5 licensed to trigger the Advanced Indexing. This may require extra steps in the scoping process.
• Teams conversations are extracted as individual message atoms for E3 targets. If Teams conversations are in scope, upgrade to E5.
• The Purview E3 (basic) audit log has a default 90 day window. That is usually too fast by the time a problem has been spotted that requires the logs to untangle. I can make an argument for log shipping or scheduled reports to build a defensible tracking system, but Premium extends the default to 1 year.
• There are automated workflows to upgrade/downgrade custodians using M365 groups. However, there are potential issues with retention versioning and other premium features that can come back to bite you. Safe to say that ‘promote on hold’ is complicated and requires extensive validation testing to avoid pitfalls.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com.  Reach out for a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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The startup 

The team has racked up 15 very impressive early customers and is backed by Andrew Sieja’s new investment group OnDean Forward, Chicago Ventures and the LegalTech Fund. Smart money is betting on the Entegrata vision. Given the massive challenges posed by the AI revolution to the traditional law firm model, I can see how Entegrata could give partners real-time data to support their adaptation strategies. On a much smaller usage case, this solves the common ‘client migration’ challenge when attorneys or practice groups decide to decamp with their clients. One entity for a dozen email addresses, phone numbers and other account names.

Briefing:

Tom Baldwin – CEO

Doug Lattanzio – VP Sales

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com.  Reach out for a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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Does Relativity have the vision, resources, and resolve to evolve from the traditional eDiscovery model it was built on?

CEO Phil Saunders’s vision of Relativity as a 100-year company powered by aiR-integrated workflows resonated at Relativity Fest 2025. He backed CPO Chris Brown’s push for a unified, dynamic RelativityOne cloud architecture—even amid pressure from customers wedded to traditional server implementations. The Relativity Fest keynote segments told a story of change: inclusive aiR functions and agents supporting far more than traditional relevance determination and production. Relativity’s announcement last week of a possible IPO should provide the resources to make that transformation real. However, IPO investors rarely reward “slow and steady” growth; they expect innovation, risk-taking, and rapid expansion into adjacent and new markets. Saunders’s leadership experience at Saba and Cornerstone provides a strong track record for navigating IPO-era expectations with the right product-market fit.

Key Relativity announcements

• Relativity launched Relativity aiR for Data Breach Response, a new module now generally available under its AI-powered aiR suite. The tool automates key breach-investigation tasks—for example, identifying personal data and generating notification-ready reports—to help organizations respond faster and more defensibly.
  • Giving corporate RelativityOne customers the ability to run their own breach-response workflows—amid an increasingly hostile threat environment—strengthens the ROI case for owning an eDiscovery platform.
• Relativity aiR for Case Strategy became generally available in January.
  • I enjoyed my Relativity Fest lab time this year and look forward to using aiR for Case Strategy upstream to get to “truth to counsel” faster on my next matter.
• Part Two of the FTI and Relativity General Counsel Report 2025 was released.

• • AI adoption is rapidly accelerating in legal departments with 87% of general counsel reporting using generative AI within their teams, nearly doubling from 2025. 39% say AI is now a strategic priority for improving legal department efficiency and effectiveness.
    • The pressure to leverage AI is much broader than legal departments or their retained counsel.
  • When asked about main concerns about the potential impact of using generative AI within their organization and legal department, those rankings almost flipped over when compared to the prior report. Data Privacy, Data Collection and Loss of jobs were at the very bottom and now Data Privacy is #1, Data Collection #2 and Loss of jobs #4. Security was #1 on the chart last year and is now #3. Additionally, overall, more concerns were expressed in terms of higher total percentage points.
    • My top concern is identification of AI generated content vs. custodial content.
  • When asked about concerns over the potential negative impacts of emerging data on legal issues, those who expressed they were Extremely concerned decreased from 21% in 2025 to 13% in 2026.
    • This may spike back up with any well publicized sanctions or evidence falsification matters.
  • Fewer respondents reported, across a range of categories, experiencing new challenges associated with collaboration applications, linked documents, cloud productivity platforms, etc., showing that some of the rapid evolution in the data landscape might have slowed.
    • AI content is so much scarier and complex than simple collaborative content that it is creating a level of consumer numbness to the risks.
  • The legal operations function is shown to have grown. When respondents were asked if they had a dedicated legal operations function, only 29% said Yes in 2025 and that rose to 41% in 2026.

Wrapping up, Relativity handled the venue migration far better than most exhibitors at Legalweek 2026. Their comparatively low-key posture on announcements now makes more sense in light of a possible IPO. I am excited about the prospects for Relativity to evolve into a broader legal data intelligence platform—one that meets the expanding challenges facing legal, compliance, and other stakeholders.

Briefing:

Phil Saunders – CEO

Cristina Rossman – CMO

Chris Brown – CPO

David Horrigan – Discovery Counsel & Edu. Dir.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com.  Reach out for a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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On other notes, Exterro continues to expand their customer base with firms and is FedRAMP moderate authorized for agencies. Since acquiring FTK, Exterro has continued to release new forensic products like FTK Imager Pro and Remote Mobile Discovery. Their agentic AI play seems to be focused more on supporting existing workflows than flashy black box query bots.

Briefing:

John Vincenzo – CMO

Bryant Bell – Lead Product Marketer

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com.  Reach out for a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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I was pleased to see the Level Legal booth in the Legalweek exhibit hall. My first briefing at Legalweek 2023 I bluntly asked, “Why brief me when you are all about quality services instead of technology innovation?” If you have not noticed, I rarely cover pure service players. Daniel Bonner answered with enthusiasm and made an impression worth following up. Then my friend David Greetham took the VP of Forensics role with Level Legal, demonstrating their investment in talent and experience.  If David has run under your radar, he received a Lifetime Achievement award at Legalweek.

In this new AI age, boutique eDiscovery firms with top talent and a drive to “deliver delight” in the midst of eDiscovery challenges may thrive as large commodity driven players starve when clients need more than the lowest $/GB. Level Legal’s tailored customer-centric approach has a clear value proposition to clients who demand top service.

My recent return to managing global providers on complex matters has highlighted the down side to the last decade of M&A consolidation. The global shops have built for efficiency and segregated their infrastructure, Ops, project management, sales and specialists with structured workflows. They have lost flexibility and accountability. “I sent that to Ops last week.” 30+ years supporting attorneys taught me that “NO” is not an acceptable answer as long as the evidence exists in some form. We in eDiscovery can do almost anything with sufficient time, funding or expertise. In the last year I have been on too many “we can’t do that” calls with counsel. Level Legal has that old school Git-R-Done attitude delivered with polish. It will be interesting to look back at this and see who survived the looming AI apocalypse challenge.

Briefing:

Joey Seeber – CEO

Jill Black – CMO

Daniel Bonner – Partner, Client Services

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com.  Reach out for a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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Copilot to rule them all, Copilot to find them, Copilot to bring them all, and in the tenant bind them

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com.  Reach out for a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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My abbreviated briefing slots have pretty much booked up, so flag me down or message me for a follow up call if you want to talk shop or have an eDiscovery bonfire that needs an expert smoke jumper.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com.  Reach out for a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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This trend makes me nostalgic for all my compliance mode Enterprise Vault implementations to comply with SEA Rule 17a-4. 3 years of 100% capture archive made my 30(b)(6) affidavits simple and definitive for that time span. It also gave counsel time to perform reasonable investigations and scoping searches before they had to pull the legal hold trigger in many scenarios. In a world awash in AI slop and the gaslighting assault on science-based truths, eDiscovery practitioners are challenged to up our preservation and authentication game.

An immutable archive is one of the only ways to ‘prove a negative’ when your opponent levels accusations of tampering or ‘recalls’ seeing documents that never existed. Default enterprise M365 or Google configurations are not 100% capture or retention. They are optimized for business value and storage management over preservation. Rapidly evolving collaborative communication and records systems require ongoing, documented testing and tuning to close potential gaps. This aligns with best cyber security and disaster recovery practices. The key is ensuring that legal stakeholders participate in change management with clear, practical requirements aligned with your litigation and regulatory profiles.

Defensibility should be built into enterprise data lifecycles. Retroactive audits are challenging, expensive exercises. The good news is that most modern, cloud architecture can be configured to support rolling archival preservation without degrading business efficiency or ballooning your storage budget for most scenarios.

My thanks to the briefing and meeting inquiries already floating in ahead of LegalWeek 2026. I am NOT excited about the venue change, but I am looking forward to connecting with peers old and new. Assuming that Calendly does not sabotage bookings, grab a time slot while they are available. I am prioritizing prospective clients with active, complex matters over product release briefings this year, so reach out if you cannot find a time slot and I will make it happen. Book a LegalWeek meeting with Greg here.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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The workflow is very straightforward. Similar to aiR for Review, you give the model an overview of the matter, people and issues through a prompt criteria template and other source information.  Then, you run fact extraction across a selected set of documents (initial 5,000 doc limit).  While that makes ECA usage scenarios on raw collections challenging, it makes sense that Relativity sees the initial usage case happening post-review on your key hot documents. While some competitors make a lot of noise about size limitations, I expect the limits to expand rapidly and recognize the value in using these tools on refined sets to reduce the noise on non-relevant docs.

The fact extraction and new aiR Fact fields are everything I wanted a few months back while in the FCPA trenches. Automatic descriptions, document summaries, linked Fact documents, issues, citation highlights, scores, rationale and the source criteria name make case strategy goals achievable without a wheelbarrow of billable hours.

What do aiR for Case Strategy deliverables look like?

• Witness summaries – Use up to 400 facts tied to your witness entity to generate the summary based on existing or edited prompt criteria (i.e. case overview). That simple. Create and edit the draft summary with citations and export to Word. This is a great way to see what the witnesses own documents say about them in the case context.
• Deposition outlines – Similar to witness summary process, though I expect that you will want to tune the prompt criteria with specific issues and goals. This is where I would want a tech savvy counsel to collaboratively work on the prompt to get at your key questions and supporting docs.
• Timeline generation – While there is not an AI wizard to generate timelines, the new fact extraction process makes timeline queries so much easier. This was my favorite Case Dynamics feature and I hope that the Relativity team continues to improve the feature functionality or even turn it into a view widget (feature suggestion).

Having a hard time getting counsel to try new toys? Find the billable hours associated with a recent witness summary or depo preparation. Run a query that includes all the witness documents for the time range (<5k hits) and generate an index. Create a quick prompt covering the case or just steal from existing case summary, hold notice and/or review protocol. Generate facts and then run the summary/outline. Compare the aiR version against work product. Highlight what was missed on either side. I do not think aiR for Case Strategy replaces counsel work product. I do think that it accelerates draft content that needs to be revised and checked.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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Until the size limit on indexes expands, I recommend a central folder for index queries and a standardized naming convention. Query chat history is user specific and private, even on public indexes. As with any AI-driven results, you should open the source citation links and confirm the AI conclusions.

Early aiR Assist capabilities are available in Advanced Access with aiR for Case Strategy with general availability for aiR Assist anticipated in 2026. This is interesting as aiR Assist is intended to be part of the core license along with aiR for Review and aiR for Privilege. The Relativity exec team said that, for now, they see aiR for Case Strategy as having distinct users and downstream use cases that justify keeping it as an add-on cost. Although many eDiscovery platforms have recently started going ‘all in’ with AI bundled pricing, it is important to remember that AI=token/processing cost. The aiR for Case Strategy roadmap includes much deeper reasoning functions and workflows that may be very processing intensive. That would give Relativity a strong incentive to keep the app license as an opt-in vs. all-in cost.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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Legal technology exists within an adversarial, confidential environment that makes collaboration and community challenging. The creation of a community innovation hub has the potential to foster customer-driven innovation and insights if it is not dominated by providers. Recent RFP engagements left me with the impression that many Relativity partners only made their Relativity custom applications and integrations available to captive customers. I understand protecting your IP investments, but that approach stagnates growth and innovation.

Relativity has 80 APIs and 500+ accessible endpoints. The goal seems to be breaking through access to reach insight tiers of extensibility. My Relativity clients have been craving cross and intra-matter insights for better matter management.

For corporate RelativityOne customers focused upstream, there is a new Collect API slated for Q1 2026 that will include all the existing enterprise connectors. V2 in later 2026 will add external custom collectors. Mature APIs ease automation, monitoring and multisystem workflow apps.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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I approached this Relativity Fest as an active customer rather than my traditional journalist/analyst role. That changed my take-aways and I hope ‘kept it real’ for fellow practitioners hopping workspaces daily. Normally I would be looking for keynote announcements with market impact on partners and competitors. This Relativity Fest, I focused on license and roadmap items that would accelerate my clients’ time to truth, reduce costs and improve upstream/downstream integrations. I am merging more specific answers from my press briefing where appropriate, so don’t think you missed something at the keynote.

Relativity Fest metrics are a good opportunity to measure platform growth:

• 1,800+ attendees, 580+ new
• 130+ new features and doubled processing speed in RelativityOne
• Relativity aiR adoption – 200+ customers, 1,500+ workspaces, 100M+ predictions

Phil Saunders – CEO

Phil Saunders

Whether on-stage or in private briefings, Phil is a straight shooter with ‘radical candor.’ Right off the bat, he acknowledged Relativity’s goal of rapid transformation vs. slow evolution. Transformation is disruptive for those who do not adapt quickly. Specifically, aiR’s transformation of review, privilege and strategy may cut into revenue from contract first pass reviewers, privilege log creation and depo/trial preparation.

Phil kind of buried the real  lede in his keynote. In 2026, aiR for Review, aiR for Privilege and aiR Assist (when generally available) will be included in the standard pricing and packaging for RelativityOne; aiR for Case Strategy will have an additional cost. This is consistent with how they rolled Relativity Analytics into the volume license previously. This may encourage partners to innovate on aiR infrastructure instead of external LLM solutions.

For years, Relativity has been a data destination for relevance determination. Phil presented the vision of the platform as a system of action for early case intelligence connecting source to strategy. I see why he led with transformation. This platform vision challenges the eDiscovery market commodity model ($/GB or $/hr). An effective early case resolution platform could disrupt volume or time charges in favor of value-based fees. Manifesting this vision will require community, innovation and execution. See my write-up of the Developer Summit for the innovation strategy.

Chris Brown – CPO

Chris did a deep dive into actual Relativity workspace growth and usage across firms, corporate and public sector customers. Litigation is a shrinking portion of global workspaces as the platform is increasingly used to support a wide variety of legal data use cases. These alternative use cases require new workflows, templates and AI models within a flexible architecture that can be adapted to their needs.

Future Chris returned as a Keynote favorite!

Relativity’s models, which are designed for different purposes, are meant to deliver the tailored insight/action each user needs – within  its platform to power outcomes for a variety of legal data intelligence use cases. Custom analysis types on top of this can help drive these use cases forward. For too long, Relativity app and script development has been an ‘expert platform for experts’ while the front-end UI has become increasingly approachable. Partners frequently use their custom apps to entice hosting customers instead of licensing them into customer-owned RelativityOne tenants. Hopefully, the new Rel Labs initiative will open the doors of customer-driven innovation to meet the diverse use cases modeled by the Legal Data Intelligence project. If Relativity is going to be our System of Action, it must be approachable by real practitioners rather than expert developers alone. The Relativity team has made strong progress recently to simplify administration, automated workflows and template creation. That signals usability is a priority alongside AI-driven features.

Lindsey Lanier – Director, Product Management

Lindsey got granular with end-to-end administrative usability and workflow improvements. Here are my key notes:

• The new UIs for security and reports look SO much easier for administrators to manage.
  • Having recently spent far too much time wrestling with permissions on workspaces with multiple overlapping reviews, I can testify to the challenges posed.
• Those of us who have burned far too many hours searching Relativity documentation are now supported by AI Help, a chatbot that surfaces content from documentation and the Community Site directly within RelativityOne.
  • While I love this for admins and experts solving issues, I would love to see a tenant level chat based on a workspace with guidelines, templates, training materials, etc.
• Legal Hold has added preservation-in-place for Slack.
• Collect AI prompts and conversations and automatically convert to RSMF from OpenAI ChatGPT Enterprise, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini.
• Collect API to open upstream sources and expand functionality.
• Transcript with video synchronization for improved review of Teams meetings (which I am seeing pop up everywhere). Redaction for Teams is coming in 2026.
• Adding document comments in the viewer for more intuitive workflows and to capture counsel perspectives outside of formal review templates.

Elise Tropiano – Senior Director, Product Management

While Elise did a fabulous job explaining aiR Assist, I covered most of this in the full Uncover Hidden Insights with aiR Assist write-up. aiR Assist is the new AI natural language query on specific data sets for fact analysis. Read the full session deep dive if this is your focus and you are eagerly awaiting the GA date.

Chris Haley – Vice President, Practice Empowerment, aiR

Where Phil Saunders set the transformation goal, Chris Haley gave specifics on how aiR for Review and aiR for Privilege are challenging traditional first pass review approaches. In the first 20 months, 200+ customers have made 100M+ review predictions. Interestingly, while 37% are for traditional relevance production scenarios, 40% were for upstream early case assessment, investigation, or document prioritization scenarios.

That last figure held the key to transformation to me. After all, productions and trial should not be the actual goal in legal disputes. We know that only 1-2% of federal matters go to trial. Application of powerful, efficient AI tech upstream is justified if you can convince retained counsel to overcome their fear of review revenue loss.

What is coming down the pipe for aiR for Review?

• Flagging for sensitive business information and PII
  • This feels like finally blending distinct apps for a broader general legal usage case.
• Custom aiR workflows to tailor or create model instructions, user inputs and results for unique use cases.
• aiR Templates allow you to manage the Relativity, Community and personal templated workflows.
  • This would give you the building blocks to automate sequential aiR tasks like macros to populate issues, priv, PII and more to power more complex requirements.
  • I love the idea of Community templates. Cannot wait for the Relativity App store…

Jim Witte – Director, Product Management

Jim covered the advances in aiR for Case Strategy (Limited General Availability). Like Elise, his write up is being abbreviated in favor of my full piece from the lab on Case Strategy. For any Case Dynamics users, the new aiR-driven version is a life saver once you have rich sets of relevant documents. The automatic generation of ‘facts’ from sets feeds into witness, depo and matter summary reports. A good client recently reminded me that witness and depo prep can consume disproportionately large portion of billable time when matters reach this late stage.

Quality AI results are dependent on quality prompt criteria and selecting your target key documents. The lab made that look easy, but the real test will be how well it runs on an existing workspace and compares to counsel generated work product. The aiR summary reports are just drafts for counsel to work from. They are meant to eliminate search drudgery and support legal analysis rather than replace it.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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Microsoft recommends using the local synchronization option for a more transactional process, but since you cannot get file or size counts from a document library, how do you know it is complete?

My preferred approach is to use eDiscovery tools for eDiscovery requests. That is not always possible or practical in heavily secured client environments. I solved this using Purview eDiscovery to search/export based on the DocumentLink: property in a KeyQL search after a LOT of testing. While the documentation makes it look simple the syntax does not exactly match up in the tenants I have tested. I recommend targeting just the specific SP/Teams Group site for search performance.

Original test folder “SPDOCLINKtest” URL in my test web SharePoint:

https://edjgroupinc.sharepoint.com/sites/testTeamsPremium-SharedChannelTest/Shared%20Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx?id=%2Fsites%2FtestTeamsPremium%2DSharedChannelTest%2FShared%20Documents%2FSPDOCLINKtest

Original test folder “SPDOCLINKtest” link copied via UI:

https://edjgroupinc.sharepoint.com/:f:/s/testTeamsPremium-SharedChannelTest/EinJvQDTqTxFvJSd9b_KGl0BoYONHHIFGFj0jdMxZaAv_A?e=9zOni4

Sharing link (existing access only):

https://edjgroupinc.sharepoint.com/:f:/r/sites/testTeamsPremium-SharedChannelTest/Shared%20Documents/SPDOCLINKtest?csf=1&web=1&e=pel0D5

Successful Reformat for KeyQL formatted target:

DocumentLink:“https://edjgroupinc.sharepoint.com/sites/testTeamsPremium-SharedChannelTest/Shared Documents/spdoclinktest*”

You may notice many subtle differences and the restoration of spaces and backslashes. In the end, the DocumentLink property in KeyQL did work to get known file count test folders. The recommended Path: property did NOT work in my tests, but I am sure it works for someone out there. I sincerely hope that this quick tech note saves someone the time and frustration I burned on my Sunday off. Purview seems to be a constantly moving target that outpaces documentation and published community testing. I do not envy the PM teams being pressured to innovate and answering to legal users demanding consistency. I invite you all to share your own Microsoft 365 and Purview gotchas under your own name or I am happy to give you anonymity to support the community.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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This is my chosen “2025 eDiscovery Trend” for my 3 minutes of fame on David Horrigan’s “The e-Discovery State of the Union” panel next week at Relativity Fest 2025. Even I cannot talk fast enough to do justice to this trend, no matter what court reporters have accused me of. So I pulled together my research material and added some take-away opinions for you. My active client matters have left me little time for blogging and research, so my thanks to Relativity for giving me a nudge to publish. If you are going and want to talk shop, show my your latest tech or have an eDiscovery bonfire grab a time slot here. (yes, the prior link was bad so there are still slots open).

The downsizing mandates include the “10-to-1” deregulatory initiative, which mandates the elimination of 10 existing regulations for every new regulation implemented as well as the “Ensuring Lawful Governance” executive order directs agencies to prioritize the repeal of regulations potentially in conflict with a specific list of recent Supreme Court decisions that have restricted the power of regulatory agencies. It is clear that federal agency and regulator scope and authority will be pushed back for at least the near future.

Staff and funding reductions in Federal regulatory agencies

Financial Institution Oversight Reductions

Source: SBS CyberSecurity – The Real Impact of Downsizing Financial Regulators

• Agencies Affected: FDIC, NCUA, OCC, Federal Reserve.
• Staff Reductions:
  • FDIC: ↓ 9% workforce.
  • NCUA: Considering ↓ 16%.
  • OCC: Laid off 75+ probationary employees.

Impact on Federal regulatory enforcement

The sudden plunge in regulatory enforcement in 2025 cannot be overstated. Beyond the numbers, eDJ has spoken with counsel and practitioners who have seen aggressive inquiries wither on the vine. Previously, such public findings of malfeasance would have been seen as zealously upholding public trust. Off the record, some regulators have expressed reluctance to make regulatory enforcement announcements that may impact important companies. “Don’t be the nail that sticks out,” seems to be a common response to the changes.

Federal Enforcement Decline

Source: Wolters Kluwer Regulatory Violations Intelligence Index

• Key Findings:
  • Federal enforcement actions dropped 37% in H1 2025.
  • Competition-related penalties fell 97% in dollar value.
  • Consumer protection violations down 22%.
  • Financial offenses dropped 53% in volume and 24% in penalties.
  • Despite cuts, the FTC continues to prioritize enforcement over rulemaking.
  • FTC focus areas include:
    • Deceptive billing and cancellation practices (e.g., action against Uber).
    • Robocall fraud: 180 actions under Operation Stop Scam Calls.
    • Consumer protection for elderly, servicemembers, and veterans.
    • AI-related fraud: Enforcement under Operation AI Comply.
    • Children’s privacy and digital harms.
    • Made in USA labeling violations.
    • Labor market abuses via a new cross-agency Labor Task Force.

Rise in State enforcement and civil litigation

Many states may respond with increased enforcement actions. They cannot replace the common federal regulatory framework, resources or jurisdiction. That leaves companies facing a patchwork of divergent state regulations, response requirements and production formats. Instead of a single partner managing a particular compliance docket, companies may have to resort to state level representation.

Companies and individuals may lose confidence in federal agencies and elect direct litigation for perceived violators. That may be good for law firms and discovery providers, but it will raise legal overhead and oversight complexity. The uncertainty adds ‘friction’ to compliance efforts in a very real sense. Courts now rely more on statutory interpretation, opening new legal strategies and increasing litigation risk for financial institutions.

State enforcement actions:

“ State Antitrust Enforcement Venue Act 28 U.S.C. § 1407 (2022) (“Act”) has enabled state attorneys general to fight to keep antitrust cases on their own turf, forcing companies to defend against antitrust lawsuits based on very similar facts in multiple jurisdictions. States have been successful under the Act thus far.”

• State Attorneys General (AGs) have significantly increased enforcement in areas traditionally overseen by federal agencies, including:
  • Consumer protection
  • Antitrust
  • Environmental regulation
  • Artificial intelligence (AI)
  • Privacy and data security
  • Healthcare and financial services
• States like California, New York, and Texas are leading the charge, often forming multi-state coalitions to pursue coordinated actions

eDiscovery planning in an uncertain regulatory environment

GC’s will be tempted to let off the gas on regulatory compliance and response initiatives. Practitioners should track relevant state and international enforcements to provide realistic impact assessments to support monitoring and discovery capabilities. Companies facing reorganization or RIFs should review employee change workflows to preserve data and key institutional knowledge. No one wants to tell a regulator that you do not have requested answers because you just cut senior management.

• Corporate legal impact:
  • Regulated verticals now face a patchwork of state-level enforcement, increasing compliance complexity.
  • Companies must invest in agile regulatory change management systems to adapt.
  • Longer gaps between examinations increase risk exposure.
  • Reduced IT and compliance spending may weaken cybersecurity.
  • External audits become critical for maintaining oversight and stakeholder confidence.
  • Perception of reduced compliance needs may cut eDiscovery and Cybersecurity prioritization and budgets.
  • The rollback of federal oversight is increasing scrutiny on litigation finance, raising concerns about funder influence and disclosure mandates.
• Norton Rose Fulbright – 2025 Annual Litigation Trends Survey (Sept 2024) Findings:
  • 73% of legal professionals expected greater uncertainty in regulated industries post-Chevron.
  • Regulatory proceedings had doubled year-over-year up through 2024.
  • 56% say pre-trial settlements are harder to reach due to aggressive plaintiffs and unclear enforcement standards.
  • Legal departments are expanding, litigation budgets are rising, and AI tools are increasingly used to manage risk.

References

[1] SEC Buyout Program and Other Initiatives Lead To Drop in Enforcement …

[2] Treasury plans to cut up to 50% of IRS enforcement staff, 20% of other …

[3] Measuring the Impact of FDA Personnel Cuts in 2025

[4] U.S. Department of Labor’s July 2025 Regulatory Rollback: Implications …

[5] June 2025 Regulatory Update: CFPB’s Historic Rollback & More

[6] Legal & Regulatory Compliance – Harvard Business Law Review (HBLR)

[7] 2025 Annual Litigation Trends Survey … – Norton Rose Fulbright

[8] Regulatory Rollback: CFPB’s Withdrawal of Informal Guidance Sparks New …

[9] eDiscovery Statistics By Market Size and Facts (2025)

[10] Compliance rollbacks and state actions on regulations: Navigating the …

[11] Legal & Regulatory Compliance – Harvard Business Law Review (HBLR)

[12] 2025 Annual Litigation Trends Survey … – Norton Rose Fulbright

[13] Regulatory Rollback: CFPB’s Withdrawal of Informal Guidance Sparks New …

[14] eDiscovery Statistics By Market Size and Facts (2025)

[15] Cut to the Chase: FTC Trims Staff but Keeps Enforcement Focus

[16] DOJ Eliminates 4,500 Jobs, Plans to Cut 1,500 From The FBI

[17] DOJ Funding Update: A Deeper Look at the Cuts – Council on Criminal Justice

[18] Department of Justice; Withdrawal of Rulemaking Actions – Federal Register

[19] 2025 Mid-Year Review: State AGs in a New Era | Regulatory Oversight

[20] The State AG Surge: The Future of Enforcement | FTI

[21] Wolters Kluwer analysis reveals federal regulatory enforcement plummets …

[22] States Ramping Up Regulations Amid Federal Pullback – Forbes

[23] Compliance rollbacks and state actions on regulations: Navigating the …

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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Going to Relativity Fest 2025 and want to meet? Grab a time slot while they are available.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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We have been following your thoughts and views on various topics within the ALSP / LPO space and are amazed at the insights you have. Our Organization is planning to get into the ALSP / LPO space and was wanting to speak with you to understand more about this area before we go live. Pl let me know if we can speak and have more understanding within this area.

Gotta love those AI image goofs…

My first response was, ‘You missed your window.’ It feels like we have passed the peak for overseas contract review, development and operations revenue. Innovators seem focused on automation and GenAI solutions for retrieval, customized solutions (vibe coding now) and large data hosting (in-place preservation/indexing). The eDiscovery market has gone through waves of acquisitions and consolidation that have produced a limited number of global players and the surviving ‘concierge providers’. I am speaking of services more than technologies, though they can be hard to tell apart these days.

My recent return to the trenches supporting high pressure, large collection matters has highlighted some benefits and limitations of the modern global service provider model. I now understand why many clients have stayed with their smaller, more nimble providers. Global providers invest in standardization, automation, throughput, security, scale capacity and customer relationship management. Centralized operations and infrastructure under modern data management systems deliver efficiency and consistency. That model makes sense if the goal of every discovery was production and trial. Volume/item-based pricing models drive mass collections, processing and AI driven review rather than matter resolution. Forensics labs and operations teams are comp’d on throughput rather than data reduction and recall. Project managers (PMs) at smaller players wear multiple hats and often work with a broader set of tools instead of an automated workflow. They are in closer communication with counsel on goals. As I said, pros and cons for both service models.

Commodification of eDiscovery services/technology erodes the traditional value of overseas providers with much lower overhead and personnel costs. Frankly volume prices and personnel rates have stabilized. New players generally cannot compete on price without sacrificing something. They have to change the game by either targeting new pain points (mobile, chat, AI, etc.) or escaping ‘linear EDRM mindset’ trap with innovative GTM strategies. Neither of these strategies are easy or low risk. How long before Microsoft or the big players solve a new data source? Will prospects bite on a savings or time-to-resolution based cost model?

New ALSP/LPO providers face a challenging market. Those with deep experience and expertise also have an opportunity to leverage the new technologies to speed time-to-truth and guide clients through GenAI adoption pain. Let the global giants fight the price and ROI wars with their branded products. Focus on supporting client goals and priorities with reasonable approaches and deep expertise so that they can practice law instead of wrangle tech. The market will support smart, focused new entrents, but the bad old days of simple hosting or contract review revenue are slowly dying.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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1802 updates – 722 in development – 200 rolling out – 874 launched

The only new feature announcement with substantial eDiscovery impact will enable direct import of non-M365 collections to Purview review sets. This ‘could’ accommodate common external collection scenarios such as mobile content, Google Drive and cloud collaboration such as WhatsApp. I advise extensive testing before you rely on this to filter or process external collections. Microsoft already has challenges keeping up with changes in their internal data sources. Importing is processing. Processing has inherent risks that include incomplete indexing and alteration/loss of non-standard metadata. Every test of large, diverse enterprise eDiscovery scenarios has found limitations and potential issues. Yes, even your favorite built-for-purpose tool has exceptions. The early days of criminal digital forensics set unrealistic expectations of ‘perfect’ recall that are unobtainable in these large data scenarios. Validation testing is generally not PASS/FAIL based on zero deficiencies. The goal is to identify the limitations, craft workflows that accommodate them and ensure reasonable diligence to prevent systematic elusion or errors.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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The MSFT Learn document lists the current potential Copilot related data sources and search condition ( Type:Copilot Activity). I ran a one day search across your tenant to see what kinds of Copilot content are being generated. I was surprised to see the summaries AND multiple versions of the Office files that they had been generated from. Obviously this kind of dense, unintended and potentially erroneous content poses risks and potential cost impacts in downstream eDiscovery.

So how can you turn Automatic Generated Summaries off?

Example Copilot automatic summary of my testing notes Word document

I could not disable them in my test tenant without shutting down all Copilot features. The options referenced below are not available in my recently updated apps.

To turn off the automatic generation of summaries in Microsoft Word, follow these steps:

1. Open Microsoft Wordand go to the File
2. Select Optionsto open the Word Options dialog box.
3. Navigate to the Add-ins
4. Find the Copilot Add-inand click on Manage.
5. Uncheck the option for Automatic Summary Generation.

Alternative disablement methods:

1. Turn off Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps – Microsoft Support
   1. Note: You can’t turn off Copilot in the iOS, Android, or web versions of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.
2. 

   Example of autogenerated summary showing up in Purview search results

   You can change your privacy settings to turn off Copilot.

   1. This turns off Copilot and autocomplete, etc.
3. Admin disable Summary banner: Turn off actionable banners in Microsoft 365 apps | Microsoft Learn

Teams meeting recaps and document summaries can be great productivity features. I just wish that MSFT would prioritize compliance and governance controls for these features BEFORE releasing them on unsuspecting customers. The good news-bad news is that MSFT development rolls out new functionality at a blistering pace. So they will probably address these issues soon, especially if we all give them feedback on the risk exposure. I will continue to highlight and share issues with potential eDiscovery/compliance impact as my case load permits. Send me anything you encounter and together we can help each other keep up.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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What Teams meeting content can Copilot generate and where is it stored?

• Meeting Summary or Recap – presently this is stored in an Azure service and it is not yet accessible to Purview. I verified this with MSFT product management and could not find any potential solution entries on the Microsoft Road Map.
• Copilot questions/answers/suggestions – these appear in the Copilot window for the user during the meeting and are stored in a hidden folder in the user mailbox as html files. The Purview export reports give the path as something like: “M365 Services/Teams/how can I find this in Purview eDiscover…/2025-06-25T18:37:24Z”.
  • While Copilot can suggest action items, tasks, etc. in the query pane the user must copy/paste them to create the actual items in usual mailbox locations presently. Although I am sure various add-ins do this today, I bet they only exist in the destination.

How can I search for Copilot content?

• As seen above, Purview cannot yet access the recap/summary. However, the meeting owner can copy it into the Meeting notes or actual meeting description to make it accessible. That is an extra step, but important for custodians on hold.
• Every user’s Copilot queries/responses are stored in a hidden folder in their mailbox. These can be retrieved with filter Type: Contains Any “Copilot content”. Before you get too excited, be aware that I observed a lot of extraneous html, json and other system files in Purview results. A simple search for a pair of test meetings generated 40+ files on export. While I did find the meeting invites, recording MP4s, a transcript json, Loop files from chat and the Copilot queries I recommend filtering out the ‘junk’ from exports before processing for review.

Until Copilot recap can be preserved/collected how can I prevent users from using it?

• While updated desktop apps are supposed to have an option to disable Copilot, this option was available for me in my own or my client’s tenants. You can disable Copilot in the iOS, Android or web versions of Word, Excel or PowerPoint.
  • There is a privacy setting that disables all enhancements (including Copilot), but that is pretty drastic.
• While administrators can disable recordings and transcripts, internal users can still activate Copilot during the meeting and get a recap in the query pane. It is based on the CC text and MSFT says that is only retained during the meeting.

To ‘recap’, enabling Copilot for employees under legal hold should be approached with caution until the busy developers at Microsoft deliver granular controls and discovery functionality for every potential new generative AI content that users spawn. Blocking access is not realistic in our hyper-competitive and productivity driven world. Run test searches to see what kinds of Copilot content already exist in your tenant. “Oh, we forgot to tell you that IT is running a pilot test and the execs wanted in.” Update appropriate usage policies, legal hold instructions and counsel guidelines for discovery protocols to minimize exposure. Test exports, processing and review presentation in your/counsel’s eDiscovery platform of choice. Verify Purview criteria to include/exclude appropriately to meet matter scope. Expect that all of this will change rapidly with little warning as the Microsoft Roadmap rolls on.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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As always, it is easier to filter and navigate on my eDiscovery Impact page or just go to the source.

Feature	Impact	eDJ Comment	Description	Details	Tags – Product	Tags – Release phase	Release	Last Modified	Published
169083	3	This has high potential value for internal ‘citizen developers’ and external partners to leverage automation through the API.	Microsoft Purview compliance portal: eDiscovery – App Permissions for Graph API	Now organizations who are automating eDiscovery workflows will be able to authenticate and execute workflows with an application based authentication method.	Microsoft Purview compliance portal	General Availability	6/1/2025	6/6/2025	2025/09/06
469500	2	eDJ recommends reviewing usage policies and providing users with Copilot clear directives on Copilot generated meeting recaps, tasks, etc. to ensure that this new content is accurate and managed by retention schedule.	OneDrive: Ask Copilot questions on meeting recordings	Select a meeting recording in your OneDrive and ask Copilot to recap the meeting, highlight parts where you were mentioned, or recommend action items and next steps. This feature requires a Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 license and will be available to commercial customers on OneDrive Web.	Microsoft Copilot (Microsoft 365), OneDrive	General Availability	3/1/2025	6/6/2025	2025/09/06
477367	2	While a thousand mailboxes is a lot, you would be amazed how quickly you can exceed the prior limit when including departmental SP/Teams sites.	Microsoft Purview compliance portal: eDiscovery – Hold limits increased per hold policy for eDiscovery Premium	The Purview eDiscovery team has increased the limits for Hold policies for eDiscovery Premium in the new purview.microsoft.com portal. The maximum number of mailboxes in a single case hold has been increased from 1,000 to 2,000. This limit includes the combined total of user mailboxes and the mailboxes associated with Microsoft 365 Groups, Microsoft Teams, and Viva Engage Groups. The maximum number of sites in a single case hold has been increased from 100 to 2,000. This limit includes the combined total of OneDrive for Business sites, SharePoint sites, and the sites associated with Microsoft 365 Groups, Microsoft Teams, and Viva Engage Groups. Overall, the maximum allowed locations in a premium case hold policy in a premium case is 4,000 (2,000 each). This is possible through the new user interface in Purview portal and not through the Classic eDiscovery experience. Additionally, this is not currently possible with Graph. The maximum hold limits for a standard case remain the same as earlier: 1,000 mailboxes and 100 sites. All other settings for eDiscovery hold continue as is. Lastly, in case of license downgrade, the system won’t remove any existing holds and won’t allow adding more, such as for a policy with a higher number of locations in it (e.g. 1500 Mailbox and 1500 Sites), and if the case setting is downgraded to E3, you will not be able to add more locations in it based on E3 limits, but you will be able to remove locations from it.	Microsoft Purview compliance portal	General Availability	3/1/2025	6/6/2025	2025/09/06
479757	2	Many of these activities are relevant to bad leaver and other compliance investigations.	Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Endpoint Data Loss Prevention: Full file evidence support for restricted apps	Full File Evidence supports activities like Cloud egress, paste to supported browser, copy to USB, Network share, RDP, Bluetooth app. Now we are expanding full file evidence collection for unallowed apps as well.	Microsoft Purview compliance portal	General Availability, Preview	4/1/2025	6/6/2025	2025/09/06
478928	2	it will be interesting to see what the summary generates. Anything that makes metrics available is an improvement. I do wonder if those metrics will be stored (static) or on-demand (dynamic).	Microsoft Purview compliance portal: eDiscovery – Quick Summarizations in eDiscovery	Introducing the “Quick Summarization” feature for eDiscovery in Purview Copilot—designed to streamline case management with an intuitive, at-a-glance overview. This new capability allows users to quickly access a comprehensive summary of eDiscovery cases, holds, and searches, eliminating the need to navigate through multiple tabs to assess status, statistics of completed actions, pending tasks, and ongoing jobs. The “Quick Summarization” feature consolidates this information into a single, easy-to-understand summary. Additionally, similar summary views are available for both Search and Hold within the eDiscovery case. Powered by existing “contextual summary” skill, the system analyzes case/search/hold metadata and generates natural language summaries, providing users with a clear, actionable overview of key details in real-time.	Microsoft Purview compliance portal	General Availability	3/1/2025	6/6/2025	2025/09/06
489215	2	This just expands the source and complexity of AI generated content that will be injected into user collections.	Microsoft Teams: Copilot in Teams meetings can search web and work files, emails and people	Weâ€re rolling out grounding with web search in Copilot for Teams meetings, enabling users to get richer, more insightful responses from Copilot. When IT administrators enable web grounding for Copilot, Copilot will be able to analyze the web to aid it in answering your questions. With added work grounding, Copilot will be able to analyze your work files, emails, and people in your organization to provide deeper insights to your questions.	Microsoft Copilot (Microsoft 365), Microsoft Teams	General Availability, Targeted Release	12/1/2025	6/5/2025	2025/09/06
488300	3	This adds another level of conversation tracking and complexity in review. Will need to see how it presents when exported.	Microsoft Teams: Threads in channels	Threads in channels allow you to start a side conversation within a channel and focus on specific topics while keeping the main conversation clutter-free. You can reply to specific messages and create a separate thread, helping to minimize distractions and foster better collaboration.	Microsoft Teams	General Availability, Targeted Release	6/1/2025	6/5/2025	2025/09/06
491632	1	Automated workflows that create content should be assessed for downstream eDiscovery impact and labeled for filtration or handling.	Microsoft Teams: New Workflows app experience in Teams and SharePoint	The new Workflows app is to provide an experience that is both simpler and faster to enable everyday Teams and SharePoint users to create automations in three steps or less.	Microsoft Teams, SharePoint	General Availability, Targeted Release	8/1/2025	6/5/2025	2025/09/06
495834	1	Another potential local only target for collections	Microsoft Edge: AI-powered History search	Enhanced search finds sites in your History even when you use a synonym, phrase, or typo. After this feature is turned on, sites you visit will be shown in enhanced history search results. An on-device model is trained using your data, which never leaves your device and is never sent to Microsoft. Admins can use the EdgeHistoryAISearchEnabled policy to disable this feature.	Microsoft Edge	General Availability	8/1/2025	6/3/2025	2025/09/06
494834	2	As Copilot pages increase adoption we will see more relevant content buried in the query history.	Microsoft Copilot (Microsoft 365): New file extension for Copilot pages	We are introducing a new file extension for Copilot pages, “.page”. This new file extension will continue to support admin toggles, sensitivity labels, data loss prevention, multi-geo, Purview eDiscovery, version history, export, audit logs, and data subject requests. The functionality and support for the .page file extension will be identical to the existing .loop file extension, with the only difference being the file extension and the associated file icon. For a comprehensive list of features supported refer to: Summary table of admin management, governance, lifecycle, and compliance capabilities based on experience	Microsoft 365 app, Microsoft Copilot (Microsoft 365)	General Availability	6/1/2025	5/29/2025	2025/09/06
495458	5	Exposing search estimates and other functions promises better transparency for partner products.	Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Enhanced eDiscovery Premium APIs	With the changes in Purview eDiscovery experience, the API support for Premium eDiscovery cases is also undergoing enhancements to align with the UI experience. We have the following APIs in Beta currently which will be moved to Live V1 version and ready for end customer use Search Estimate Statistics Search Export Report Search Export Result Search Add to ReviewSet ReviewSet Export	Microsoft Purview compliance portal	General Availability	6/1/2025	5/29/2025	2025/09/06
493752	5	The method of preservation matters. It appears that prior labeling of cloud attachments may not have covered all versioning copies.	Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Cloud Attachments preservation for users on hold	Enables cloud attachment preservation for users put on infinite hold so that file versions shared are preserved across any OneDrive or SharePoint site. This is a new capability which is different from the existing capability of applying label to cloud attachments and links present in OneDrive and SharePoint and shared in Exchange, Teams, Viva Engage and Copilot	Microsoft Purview compliance portal	General Availability, Preview	8/1/2025	5/27/2025	2025/09/06
494151	3	If you are relying on the default M365 policy to prevent meeting recordings/transcripts you need to update that policy.	Microsoft Teams: Default Teams Calling global policy to enable users to transcribe or record calls	Weâ€re updating the default global calling policy for new tenants to allow users to transcribe or record calls. Previously, these settings were turned off by default in the host global policy. With this update, recording and transcription will be enabled by default in the global calling policy for new tenants and existing tenants who have not modified the host global policy. This change will not impact existing custom policies or modified global policies. After this rollout, recording and transcription services will be more accessible to users, allowing them to turn on and use recording and transcription as needed during Teams calls. Neither recording nor transcription will be automatically enabled in Teams calls. This update is designed to broaden access to AI-powered features like Calls Recap and Calling Copilot, enhancing the overall calling experience. It also brings calling policy defaults in line with Teams meetings policies, where recording and transcription are already enabled by default.	Microsoft Teams	General Availability, Targeted Release	7/1/2025	5/27/2025	2025/09/06
492621	2	Nice tool to generate scoping reports for counsel in large SharePoint/Teams tenants	SharePoint: Permissions report for a given user – SharePoint admin center	This report, under Data access governance within SharePoint admin center, provides SharePoint admin with a list of sites where the given user has direct and indirect permissions at a site/lib/folder/file level	SharePoint	General Availability	7/1/2025	5/21/2025	2025/09/06
396562	3	Copilot activities are already surfaced in Purview eDiscovery. Graph will enable Pshell, custom apps and partner apps to access this new information.	Microsoft Graph: Graph API – Copilot for Microsoft 365 usage	Copilot for Microsoft 365 usage will be added to the Microsoft Graph API, allowing for the creation of customized reporting and analytics. Metrics included in the Graph API will match those available in the Copilot for Microsoft 365 usage report in the Microsoft 365 admin center, including tenant-level count of enabled users and active users, as well as last activity date per user (all up and per Microsoft 365 app).	Microsoft 365 Admin Center, Microsoft Copilot (Microsoft 365), Microsoft Graph	General Availability, Preview	9/1/2025	5/21/2025	2025/09/06
464995	2	Copilot pages are highly useful and eDJ expects to see them in discovery and important workflows for key decision makers.	OneNote: Copilot Notebooks inside OneNote	Users can now access Copilot Notebooks inside OneNote. Using Copilot Notebooks, users can pull together and reason over a wide range of content such as notes, documents, websites, meeting recordings, and more.	Microsoft Copilot (Microsoft 365), OneNote	General Availability	5/1/2025	5/19/2025	2025/09/06
494160	5	Exposing data sources and custodian association sounds great. Deletion of searches opens potential compliance gaps. I have requested clarification on the indexing changes.	Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Modern eDiscovery additional enhancements	We are introducing several more enhancements to the eDiscovery modernized user interface. These updates include the ability to delete searches, bulk add data sources, custodian field for items review set and export, and advanced indexing enhancements that will further enhance the user experience in the eDiscovery modern workflows.	Microsoft Purview compliance portal	General Availability	6/1/2025	5/16/2025	2025/09/06
493946	3	Employee departure management is frequently a major eDiscovery preservation gap. This adds useful tools, but needs exploring to ensure preservation of content under hold.	OneDrive: Transfer ownership of departing employees†files with ease	Weâ€ve made it easier to manage files when employees leave—account cleanup emails are now more prominent, new filters help managers quickly locate key files, and the enhanced “Move and keep sharing” feature supports bulk transfers with consolidated notifications, making the process more efficient. Security and compliance in ownership transfer ensures sensitive data remains protected, access is properly reassigned, and regulatory obligations are met during employee offboarding.	OneDrive	General Availability, Targeted Release	6/1/2025	5/16/2025	2025/09/06
493949	2	This is essentialy adding a BCC function to meeting chat. Will need to test how it is exported and presented in review.	Microsoft Viva: Organizers reply privately to individuals	Allows Engage event organizers to answer questions from specific attendees without displaying the reply to the other participants. This capability can be helpful for sensitive questions, personal inquiries, or follow-up discussions that are not intended to be broadcast to the entire audience.	Microsoft Viva	General Availability	6/1/2025	5/14/2025	2025/09/06
421612	1	Departing user workflows are an essential part of your overall governance process and Loop’s collaborative nature add complications to preservation	Microsoft 365 app: Microsoft Loop – Departed user content workflows for user-owned Loop workspaces	Manage retention and deletion workflows for user-owned Loop workspaces like Copilot Pages when users leave the organization. Notify and provide temporary access to other employees or administrators to save important data before deletion policies take effect.	Microsoft 365 app	General Availability	8/1/2025	5/13/2025	2025/09/06
472022	2	Just as personal Loop Workspaces will be rolling out, Teams channels (M365 Group entities) will also have Loop Workspaces as a new eDiscoveyr target.	Microsoft 365 app: Microsoft Loop – Add a Loop Workspace to your Teams Channel	Channels in Microsoft Teams streamline collaboration by bringing people, content, and apps together and helping to organize them by project or topic. You will be able to add a Loop workspace tab to standard channels enabling your team to brainstorm, co-create, collect, and organize content—together in real-time. Everyone in the Team gets access to the Loop workspace, even as Team membership changes, and the workspace adheres to the governance, lifecycle, and compliance standards set by the Microsoft 365 Group backing the team. To get started, click the plus sign (+) at the top of the channel and select Loop from the app list.	Microsoft 365 app	General Availability, Targeted Release	4/1/2025	5/9/2025	2025/09/06
415454	5	ALERT – While I believe this deadline will have to be pushed by customer outcry, peers should immediately evaluate the new Portal and how to adapt their workflows.	Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Classic Microsoft Purview Compliance portal will be retired by end of 2024	Classic Microsoft Purview Compliance portal will be retired by 2024 and the new Microsoft Purview portal will provide all existing capabilities and more. The new Purview portal offers a streamlined design and a unified experience, allowing you to discover and access data security, data governance, and risk and compliance solutions for all your data, wherever it resides across your data estate.	Microsoft Purview compliance portal	General Availability	12/1/2024	5/8/2025	2025/09/06

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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I could hear Irfan’s excitement, “We get to innovate like a startup again!” Anyone who has worked for a global corporation understands the pressure to align your product or services to the broader company go-to-market strategy as teams compete for resources and revenue. The Arctera Insight Platform creates a common governance architecture that supports cross-pollination of features for on-premise, hybrid, customer tenant or fully-managed SaaS deployments. With over 120 data source connectors, the platform approach allows surveillance features like video analysis to propagate to eDiscovery review with minimal friction.

In an industry increasingly driven by a cloud-only vision, Arctera is also committed to evolving their on-premises options (including those which I fondly remember being branded Clearwell eDiscovery) to support clients with high security or cross border eDiscovery requirements. For the legacy Enterprise Vault on-premise customers, they have migrated more than 5 PB (over 28 billion documents) to cloud archives. That should give the large existing customer base confidence and options.

Key takeaways:

• Deep development and services with 1,500 employees
• Quarterly releases across all three product platforms
• Continues Microsoft partnership and better-together story with upcoming M365 targeted preview. See and search M365 content in place.
• Mobile content archiving via partnership with Sausalito Labs, LeapXpert, and TeleMessage
• Gartner named Arctera a leader in the inaugural Digital Communication Governance and Archiving Solutions (DCGA) Magic Quadrant report.
• Insight AI for automated classification, summarization, timelines, entity extraction and matter analysis. “Break the pump-dump cycle with Insight.”
  • Based on Azure OpenAI, customers can keep their content and AI models within their own tenant.
  • Currently no Insight AI charges today with free 10M tokens.

I am looking forward to seeing how this broad portfolio of point products consolidates and how the market responds to the changes. They are positioned to address the turnkey requirements of regulated verticals and SMBs with discovery/compliance exposure. Brand and product transformations can be tricky and demand a heavy marketing outreach to sustain growth. With almost $17B in market capitalization, parent Carlyle Group has the resources to make that transition.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

Greg’s latest nature, art and diving photographs on Instagram.

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“Expertise can be more widely available than experts.”

What Elevate’s Data & AI Consulting team is working on today:

• Investment and overhaul of breach response services to automate workflow and reduce response time.
• Contract ELM accelerating lifecycle management and quality.
• Applying near duplicate AI to plagiarism, copyright, privilege and expert report scenarios.
• Developing custom tools and connectors with open source AI such as Zeta Alpha to power search and other functionality with M365, Relativity and other platforms.
• Creating an open source AI test toolkit.

In this age of market consolidation, far too many acquisitions are based on leveraging captive customers acquired rather than value synergies. Elevate’s 2024 investments in the CJK Group and Redgrave Data seem to have broadened their expertise, technology stack and offerings. Where other players try to be pure service or technology providers, Elevate’s “Expert-led. Software powered” value statement will appeal to sophisticated customers with complex challenges.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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CrossCopy Enterprise is what I call a thin layer SaaS platform that manages collection workflows and keys, but does not store or host your collections. This ‘light’ approach minimizes security, access compliance and overhead cost by storing collections directly in customer AWS, Azure, or SFTP storage. Collections are made via network wifi/connection like Exterro’s recent Remote Mobile Discovery release. Custodians receive a link (via email or text) to the browser-based collection UI that does not require local software/app installation for local, network, and cloud sources. Slack and Teams are on deck slated to be released over the next couple of months.

Apple iOS devices require a one-time cable connection authentication. This seems to be a universal Apple security architecture requirement affecting all collection solutions. For Android, selective and updated collections run natively on the Android device with custodian acceptance. The custodian can use their phone while the process takes place. CrossCopy Enterprise runs in the background, allowing the end-user to conduct business as usual without tethering to a computer, as everything is done on the Android device. The ‘Executive Mode’ enables custodian driven content selection to minimize privacy or sensitivity issues. Predefined search criteria can also be used, so the custodian only needs to click on a link, and CrossCopy Enterprise will collect the data that match attorney criteria.

CrossCopy Enterprise can be purchased with an unlimited enterprise license or in 10 custodian blocks for what seems like a competitive rate as you get to collect from multiple sources. Most of my recent remote custodians had multiple mobile, laptop and tablet devices that would all have been covered under a single CrossCopy Enterprise custodian token. This is a major cost consideration for professional custodians with company AND BYOD phones that may span multiple upgrades or have a need for second requests.

Selective messaging collections are based on date and contacts. Text and WhatsApp collections are already supported while Telegraph, Signal, WeChat and Vibechat are in development.

I am delighted to have another practical remote collection solution to include in upcoming mobile device RFPs. Client regulatory, compliance, HR and security requests increasingly focus on mobile messaging content. Selective remote collection could address many preservation requirements for departing custodians under hold. Like Pinpoint’s Harvester Software, CrossCopy Enterprise also covers a wide array of cloud and endpoint sources (soon to include Teams and Slack) to supplement your Purview holds and collections.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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VP of Product Dave Ruel dove deep into how Hanzo leverages smart API’s, Dynamic Capture Technology and predictably priced secured LLM models to tackle investigations, ECA, compliance monitoring and other real world governance use cases. Their new Spotlight AI solution should speak to corporations feeling AI hesitancy over the inherent uncertainty of ‘per Token’ charges and the data security challenges with API calls to global public LLMs.  The market favors predictable, practical solutions that address recognized pain points over unspecified ‘fast, better, cheaper’ easy button pitches.

Hanzo started as a SaaS Information Governance archive for regulated enterprise customers. Their compliance story has expanded to provide customers with in-place investigations, ECA, legal holds and secure AI-driven relevance and classification over complicated data sources outside of their M365 tenants. We all need the tools to reach beyond our traditional email and files as our custodians innovate with new data sources and types.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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While I do not do demo’s at conferences, AJ did challenge me to submit a question for an Everlaw case loaded with the Opioid litigation data set pulled from a public archive

“Did the opioid manufacturers monitor for locations distributing excessive volumes of prescriptions in excess of the served population and how did they respond if pill-mills were identified?”

Project Query provided an overview of compliance monitoring systems utilized by the companies, policies and procedures with the most relevant facts ranked and linked      to the source documents in seconds. This is exactly the kind of question that I would normally spend hours of client billable time constructing multiple searches to build a substantiated answer for counsel. The ROI is clear. Does that put me out of a job? No, but it does eliminate billable or delegated grunt work grinding through hundreds or thousands of results. I would rather deliver value with smart questions than bill for clicking and tagging.

Beyond Everlaw’s latest AI release, they have been making market moves expanding to UK, European and global customers with in-region data processing, G-Cloud status, large volume translations and a new global Everlaw Staging Drive. I heard Everlaw mentioned frequently as gaining market traction with reliable, practical functionality and simple licensing. They are definitely on my RFP candidate list for corporations taking ownership of their eDiscovery since the Pandemic Pause.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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Phil Saunders

Phil Saunders kicked off the briefing by tackling his January announcement that many have interpreted as Relativity Server EoL in 2028. I had certainly heard from many competitors eager to take advantage of Relativity Server customers not ready to embrace the cloud for a variety of reasons. I get the ‘new’ Relativity leadership vision that cutting edge AI driven eDiscovery technology requires native cloud infrastructure to thrive. Over 75% of Relativity customers are already on RelativityOne. The long lead time and geographic exceptions give customers time to explore their options. The team was clear that existing Relativity Server matters, created on or before December 31, 2027, will continue to be supported in Server.

The policy states: “By 2028, all new matters will be hosted in RelativityOne with some limited customer and geographic exceptions. Legacy matters can continue to be supported in Relativity Server if the customer or Partner chooses to do so.”

Relativity Server customers should keep monitoring Relativity announcements as they evaluate their own long-term plans. We are living in a time of technology and business transformation that may very well overturn the best laid strategies and relationships. I appreciate leadership that gives customers their unfiltered vision despite the ease that it can be twisted or misinterpreted. There will always be a need to leverage the best legal and governance technology inside the firewall. Relativity’s FedRAMP authorized RelativityOne Government is just one example of meeting customer security requirements.

I think that aiR workflows have potential to address broader customer needs for simplified workflow and user experience. Corporate customers may not require every feature or option that supports complex, large-scale litigation. AI driven workflows offer the potential to support single user investigation and hold scoping scenarios with custom or even ‘bring your own LLM’ solutions without heavy training or expensive expertise.

Getting the scoop on Relativity Server left little time to cover updates on aiR for Review, aiR for Privilege, Purview Sync and the Legal Data Intelligence initiative, so expect post-LegalWeek updates in the coming weeks.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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I want to call your attention to 458766- Efficient Review with Advanced Minimization Algorithms and 484086- Advanced Review Set Query Editor. These feel like the first real development investments in the Purview eDiscovery review UX in a long time. It is interesting how many Microsoft review partners have positioned themselves alongside Purview as a simple hold/collection tool. These roadmap features could be interpreted as Microsoft wanting to take back review.

So how is it different?

• StreemView’s database architecture stores mobile and collaboration content in their native object format. This supports whole conversation search and presentation rather than disparate PDF/HTML chunks.
• Visualization of chronological ‘streams’ allows investigators to see events in context.
• Patent pending deduplication across devices and apps to untangle Android vs. iOS content.
• Name normalization across sources supports custodial search.
• Direct remote collection to the cloud repository via ModeOne and other integrations.
• Predictable pricing per custodial source and monthly AI per user.
• AI auto-classification of problematic content such as PII, junk, fraud, etc.

The market seems to be fixated on an all-inclusive eDiscovery platform that normalizes  every data source into a discrete document. The reality of rapidly evolving cloud, collaborative and mobile data complexity keeps specialized tools relevant and worth consideration, especially if your goal is investigative “time to truth” to steal Kelly Twigger’s fabulous catch phrase.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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Hot Takes:

• Marketing visual overload. From the revolving doors, the foyers, escalators, elevators, bathrooms, giant digital walls and pretty much every available surface plastered with logos and one line pitches. Too be fair, it seemed like a few players were spending big on sponsor advertisement while most were content with a smaller booth and a lot of adjacent meetings. That level of marketing spend smells of desperation to me, though your take may vary.
• AI Overload – Almost every booth or advertisement plastered over every surface included AI.
  • “AI Washing” – best catch phrase I encountered for the vast majority of AI offerings.
• Much higher attendee proportion of women and PoC. It was fabulous to see the representation.
  • “Women are the new face of legal because we get things done.” Favorite quote of the week.
  • The safe space messaging was well placed and appreciated given the changing demographics.
• “Platform” used everywhere. What does it even mean now? SaaS? Multiple point products merged into a GUI? Some workflow?
• Lots and lots of new startups and rebrandings manned by familiar faces who seem to have found opportunity in the aftermath of all the market consolidation cuts.
• Investment money seems to be flowing into legal technology. Outreach from VC/PE investors. Executives asking, “Who would you buy?“
• Less giant extravaganza parties and fewer adjacent formal events. Tons of smaller Tuesday-Wednesday dinners and private gatherings.
• LegalWeek 2026 is moving from the Hilton! March 3-9 Javits Center, New York (Chelsea). I am struggling to understand the move. The reported attendance (6,000 registered pre-show) is well within the Hilton’s capacity. Maybe it is to force business development meeting back into the facility instead of the adjacent Warwick, Sheraton, etc? The loss of close restaurants, bars, hotels and more seems like it will hurt attendees on tight budgets.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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LegalWeek 2024 still felt like more of a business development gathering, though I was happy to see more relaxed, diverse practitioners wandering between sessions. I am excited to use the few hours I have reserved for perambulating the exhibit hall to get my annual fast take on our evolving industry. Below are a few sessions that I found interesting, even if I am too booked up to attend more than my own time as a talking head. As always I love to hear your impressions and meet new peers on the fly, so flag me down and introduce yourself or just send me a note. My briefing slots are all booked up, but I will be anchoring a table at McGee’s Pub Sunday 5-7pm for other early arrivals who want to talk shop.

Sessions of Note:

Evolving Jurisprudence: Key Court Rulings Shaping the Use of E-Discovery Technology

Supported by: Thomson Reuters

Speakers:

Ruth Hauswirth, Special Counsel, Head of Litigation & eDiscovery and Information Retention Counseling, Cooley LLP

Dawson Horn, President, BUiLT

Jeremiah Wikler, Partner, Shook, Hardy & Bacon L.L.P.

Phil Favro, Special Master, Mediator, Expert Witness, Innovative Driven

Hon. Andrew Peck (Ret.), Senior Counsel, DLA Piper

Sherry Levin Wallach, Deputy Executive Director, The Legal Aid Society of Westchester County

Microsoft Teams Chat and Channel Evolution: What’s Coming and Why It Matters for Your Organization

Speakers:

Dan Paquette, Practice Group Leader – Modern Work, Kraft Kennedy

Carolyn Humpherys, Learning and Change Management Consultant, Traveling Coaches, Inc.

Nick Francis, Senior Technical Specialist – Copilot, Microsoft

Disappearing Guidance: Locating Previously Available Government Agency Information

Speakers:

Andrea Guldalian, Director of Library & Research Services, Duane Morris LLP

Christine George, Associate Director for Research & Scholarship, NYU School of Law

Jack Cushman, Director, Library Innovation Lab, Harvard Library Innovation Lab

Phil J. Rosenthal, Chief Growth Officer, vLex

Simplify, Automate, Innovate: SharePoint Agents in Action

Speakers:

Nick Francis, Senior Technical Specialist – Copilot, Microsoft

Julie Strachan Haiber, Senior Vice President, Client Engagement, Harbor

Negotiating ESI Protocols for the Use of Generative AI in eDiscovery

Speakers:

Aurora Bryant, Senior Counsel for eLitigation, Office of the Assistant Attorney, Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice

Joseph P. Guglielmo, Partner, Scott+Scott Attorneys at Law LLP

Jason Lichter, Principal, Troutman Pepper Locke eMerge

Cristin Traylor, Senior Director, AI Transformation and Law Firm Strategy, Relativity

Generative AI: Judges, Lawyers, and Technologists on Legal Ethics and Practical Guidance

Speakers:

Hon. Tanya R. Kennedy, Associate Justice, Appellate Division, First Judicial Department, New York State Supreme Court

Hon. Xavier Rodriguez, U.S. District Judge, US District Court – Texas Western District

David Cohen, Partner and Records and eDiscovery Practice Leader, Reed Smith LLP

David Horrigan, Discovery Counsel & Legal Education Director, Relativity

Linda Sheehan, Head of intelligENS, ENS

AI Tetris Masterclass: Layering AI for Maximum Litigation Efficiency

Speakers:

Martha Louks, Director of Technology Services, McDermott Will & Emery

Aaron Crews, Non Equity Partner, Holland & Knight

Ilan Sherr, Executive Director, Aiscension, Aiscension / DLA Piper

Sam Sessler, Assistant Director, Global eDiscovery Services, Norton Rose Fulbright

Cat Casey, Chief Growth Officer, Reveal

Knowing When, How, and Where to Leverage AI

Speakers:

E.J. Bastien, Sr. Director, Discovery Programs, Microsoft Corporation

Todd Itami, Of Counsel, Covington

Fernando Delgado, Senior Director, AI & Analytics, Lighthouse

Amy Sellars, Attorney, Gunster

Mythbusting Collaboration in Complex Litigation: Streamlining Team Comms and Doc​ Sharing

Speakers:

Lindsey Lanier, Director, Product Management, Relativity

Candi Smith, eDiscovery Analyst, The Walt Disney Company

Scott Milner, Global Leader eData Practice, Partner, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP

Greg Buckles, Market Analyst – Press, eDiscovery Journal

E.J. Bastien, Sr. Director, Discovery Programs, Microsoft Corporation

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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That does not diminish the flurry of new product launches, embargoed press releases and briefing requests that have filled my feeds and inbox. AI innovation has driven a perceptible spike in the eDiscovery market. I am excited to walk the floor and take in 2025’s booth messaging, placement and adjacent gatherings. My Tuesday-Wednesday briefing slots are all gone and I noted that many executives were only available on these days. That will make a busy 48 hours for most attendees.

The session panels seem to be packed with eDiscovery luminaries (aka talking heads such as mwah) and actual firm/corporate practitioners. The topics/CLE summaries seem content rather than product driven, which is a welcome change.

Maybe all of these trends are signs of industry maturity.  For a couple of years I worried that the provider consolidation from all the investor capital would kill competition. New launches like Altorney’s MARC and dozens of new AI driven products have alleviated my concerns. Instead, I see a market pivoting from raw data hosting and contract review services to embrace this technology wave. Innovation is alive and well in legal technology. I hope to visit with friends new and old in New York.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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I am in prep mode for Legal Week and supporting several hot matters. So the search guide and detailed testing notes many of you have requested will take a bit longer to finalize. I am also working with the Purview team to run down some potential issues experienced in client tenants. The only open issue with significant potential issue involves malformed or truncated PSTs from larger email exports. This is easy to catch in QC and work around with MSG format exports. I will publish an update after the Purview team has time to debug it. As always, trust but verify before relying on any new technology or upgrade.

Legal Week 2025!

My briefing and evening schedule has been filling up but there are a few formal briefing/meeting slots still available here. For those of you coming in Sunday who might want to talk shop, I am going to post up at the McGee Pub starting at 5. Drop through and introduce yourself!

Please join me Tuesday for Mythbusting Collaboration in Complex Litigation: Streamlining Team Comms and Doc Sharing at 3:30 p.m. ET in Trianon Ballroom: Microsoft-supported session to explore how legal teams can streamline document sharing and optimize communication workflows to keep all stakeholders connected and informed.

• • Lindsey Lanier, Director, Product Management, Relativity
  • Candi Smith, eDiscovery Analyst, The Walt Disney Company
  • Scott Milner, Partner & Global Practice Group Leader, eData, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP
  • Greg Buckles, Market Analyst – Press, eDiscovery Journal
  • E.J. Bastien, Sr. Director, Discovery Programs, Microsoft Corporation

I will try to publish my ‘do not miss’ list of sessions asap. In the meantime, enjoy this moment of Zen from last week’s dolphin encounter on Bonaire.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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• MARC runs inside your Azure tenant and works directly with Purview for search and retrieval.
• Searches are exported to your Azure container for processing and review.
• MARC is LLM-agnostic. You can even spin up local LLMs within your tenant for complete isolation.
• “Lawyers should not be prompt engineers.” – Rachi Messing. MARC is a promptless approach where you input the RFP and similar documents to generate a review protocol and coded set.

It helps to put 2024-2025 in perspective. The 2020 Pandemic Pause was an unprecedented halt in legal matters. It allowed GCs to reflect on the cost and risk of traditional outsourced discovery. Microsoft reps upsold M365 E5 licenses to CIO’s promising massive savings from remote work, collaboration (Teams), Compliance (Purview) and early analytics (AI). The last administration generally ramped up regulatory enforcement to catch up with the EU. The last half decade has delivered massive technological advancements that legal/compliance practitioners are still chasing.

All of these factors put enormous pressure on GCs to adapt quickly to control risks and costs. Hence the trends of in-sourcing eDiscovery platforms, managed eDiscovery services, legal ops and upstream analytics/AI for investigations/ECA before formal discovery. We now have the tools for corporations to ‘own’ their eDiscovery as long as they can develop the right resources and workflows. For too long corporate counsel threw eDiscovery over the ‘fence’ to retained counsel and providers. This survey highlights the realization that discovery starts at ESI creation rather than receipt of a request for production.

New features were dominated by Copilot integrations and development support last month. Some minor Purview release date updates and adding Loop Workspaces to Teams channels are the only real eDiscovery related roadmap updates. I would like to call attention to the “(Preview)” label in the new Purview eDiscovery Hub UX. Users are already been automatically redirected to the new web page. MSFT support has confirmed that ‘preview’ means ‘do not use yet’, though that is NOT stated in the online documentation. The prior Roadmap note (415454) and documentation stating that the classic Purview eDisocovery UI has mysteriously vanished . The new UX is available to enable users to adapt their workflows in preparation, but apparently has known issues with export and my testing found other potential search syntax issues that MSFT PM have engaged with me on (when I can get my head out of a couple cases to take up their kind offer). In the meantime, please use the older web page or PowerShell cmdlets.

I am still booking briefing slots at 2025 LegalWeek here!

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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A young Houston Police Department CSI with a table of evidence, my how the years have flown

My apologies for going dark over the holidays. My favorite client asked for an intervention, and I have been back in the trenches running Purview searches and meeting unmovable deadlines. You will benefit from a lot of anonymized lessons learned when I have caught up on sleep. After skimming a couple of peers 2024 look backs, it struck me how little discovery has changed over my 35+ years in the hot seat. The technology has evolved to tackle much larger collections, but counsel still wants eyes on every document in production.

On a personal note, 2024 has had me researching and brainstorming with peers on how to stay relevant and valuable in the AI age. You have little time to consume news, perspectives and caselaw. The newest generation of eDiscovery practitioners seem to want curated sound and video bytes more than well researched practice and technology how to’s. I have been publishing my solo consulting research and perspectives for ‘free’ since we shut down our formal market analyst practice. This recent matter has reminded me how much I enjoy problem solving under the production deadline. So do not be surprised if eDiscovery Journal evolves this year. In the meantime, enjoy this adaptation of the Talking Heads Once in a Lifetime brought to you by Copilot and yours truly.

And you may find yourself, buried in a mountain of paper
And you may find yourself, in another endless discovery request
And you may find yourself, behind the wheel of outdated software
And you may find yourself, in a beautiful office, with a beautiful view
And you may ask yourself, well…How did I get here?

Letting the cases go by, let the data hold me down
Letting the cases go by, data flowing underground
Into the archives again, after the budget’s gone
Once in a lifetime, data flowing underground

And you may ask yourself, how do I manage this?
And you may ask yourself, where is that new technology?
And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful office
And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful view

Letting the cases go by, let the data hold me down
Letting the cases go by, data flowing underground
Into the archives again, after the budget’s gone
Once in a lifetime, data flowing underground

Same as it ever was… Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was… Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was… Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was… Same as it ever was…

Data dissolving…and data redacted
There is data at the bottom of the server
Under the data, metadata in the slack space
Remove the hidden data behind the documents

Letting the cases go by, let the data hold me down
Letting the cases go by, data flowing underground
Into the archives again, into the silent data
Under the rocks and stones, there is data underground

Letting the cases go by, let the data hold me down
Letting the cases go by, data flowing underground
Into the archives again, after the budget’s gone
Once in a lifetime, data flowing underground

And you may ask yourself, what is that beautiful settlement?
And you may ask yourself, where does that thread go to?
And you may ask yourself, is it relevant?…is it spam?
And you may say to yourself, my God!…What has counsel done?!

Letting the cases go by, let the data hold me down
Letting the cases go by, data flowing underground
Into the archives again, into the silent data
Under the rocks and stones, there is data underground

Letting the cases go by, let the data hold me down
Letting the cases go by, data flowing underground
Into the phones again, after the budget’s blown
Once in a lifetime, data flowing underground

Same as it ever was… Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was… Look where my coffee was
Time isn’t billable, time is a write off
Same as it ever was… Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was… Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was… Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was… Yeah, the twister comes
Here comes the twister, same as it ever was…

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

Greg’s latest nature, art and diving photographs on Instagram.

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Once upon a time (Enron discovery days) my team had a 5000/1 rule on email. For every 5,000 email reviewed, one violation was referred to HR. Email was the new informal communication platform, just like chat is today. Employees in non-regulated verticals were not monitored and inappropriate speech and attachments were common. Regulators and the DoJ demanded email because that is where the ‘real conversations’ resided. Those ‘real’ communications have now migrated to internal and external chat platforms.

Recent client data map engagements have revealed explosive growth in Teams, Slack and other external chat platforms. Preservation and collection features have lagged adoption and innovation, creating opportunities for 3^rd party information governance solutions like Opus Guard and Actera. eDiscovery platforms like Relativity, Reveal, Exterro and Everlaw have improved their connectors, processing and review handling of collaborative chat streams.

How is chat different from email and how can corporate legal teams adapt to meet preservation and collection obligations? I am going to focus on M365 Teams as I have the most experience with it.

I think of collaborative channel chats as recordings of conversations, reactions and item exchanges that take place in a virtual ‘room’ over time. Participants join and leave multiple interwoven topics that can cover months. The room or channel is owned by the M365 Team site group and group messages are stored in that group mailbox. 1-1 chats are stored in participant mailboxes and are generally much easier to find and make sense of.

Sources: The first challenge is identifying the Teams sites/channels with potentially relevant conversations and content. The new Purview eDiscovery portal has enhanced the ability to search by site and channel names, but that is always problematic. The traditional approach is to interview key custodians. Custodians frequently forget the full names of channels and you may not have all the key players nailed down yet. I prefer to run test searches with unique terms/phrases or participants in Purview eDiscovery and export the reports to build location lists for counsel. Based on the location names and hit metrics counsel can confirm key Teams sites and use the lists in custodial interviews.

Conditions: Searching for Teams chat uses search conditions or KQL (kind:im AND kind:microsoftteams). You can use these in combination with participants condition as well. I like to use scoping reports to understand whether the hits are clustered or distributed over days. Time clustered hits can usually be collected in the new 12-hour chunks while occasional mentions scattered over days may require entire channel chat collection by broad time bands when your unique terms are not being used consistently. The point is to search and use the new metrics charts or exported reports to assess scope and get counsel’s informed consent.

Add to Review Set/Export: The new Purview eDiscovery portal has new options for collection chat content.

• Chat conversations can be collected in HTML transcript format. This definitely makes review much easier AND my quick test even found emoji reactions (prior gap). Many processing platforms may not handle the new HTML format well. It also may pose redaction/disclosure issues by collecting non-relevant conversation segments. I can also see the 12-hour cut off generating questions from opposing counsel, especially if privilege content is present.
• Chat cloud attachments from mailbox conversations (that is where chat is stored) can now be retrieved with same options as SPOD.
• File version retrieval option include latest version only, last 10, last 100 or all versions. This can make a huge impact on matter volume. I recommend establishing a default and updating request parameters so that counsel can call out versions where important. Most of the time I recommend reviewing the latest version and recollecting prior versions during review for important items unless versions are specified in the eDiscovery agreement.

Preview in Purview: While Purview is not a full featured review UX, it can be used for internal preview of search results when you need to dig into your scope definition. The display of chat chunks is pretty good and you can inspect the metadata fields to refine participant name formats and other conditions. Microsoft has improved the performance now that advanced indexing is done on hold destinations and searches. However, the review analytics (threading and adding other discovery metadata) still seem to take a long time. I have them off by default until I know that I need those fields populated.

External Processing: Depending on your eDiscovery platform, processing chat/IM is still a bit of an art form. There are lots of options that can have downstream and production impact. I recommend running test batches and starting with a firm understanding of the agreed production parameters before you kick off a giant set of chat content. Do you want to organize the production by channel or participant(s)? Does the requesting party consider the HTML chunk format native? Do they want individual messages in standard JSON, RSMF or other platform format? How are you going to handle deduplication of hyperlinked attachments that may show up in MANY other contexts?

As you can see, modern chat is not the same as email. This should be on your radar and you need to adapt your procedures and defaults to accommodate the new ‘water cooler’ conversations.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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Purview eDiscovery (Premium) Portal Decisions:

• Integration of Content Search. Who are existing MIS or other stakeholders previously using Content Search and how to support them with dedicated cases?
• Should you leave classic UX available?
• Whether to use the privilege detection model?
  • If so, who pulls together the attorney email list from what source?
• Can case owners override the tenant settings?
• Default tenant wide query scope includes guest mailboxes, inactive mailboxes, group mailboxes and shared Teams channels?
• Chat collections/exports to use 12-hour conversation chunks and export in HTML?
• Default SharePoint, OneDrive and chat attachment version collection?
• SharePoint, OneDrive folder hit expansion?
• List hit expansion and attachments?
• Do you use new SIT, Sensitivity levels and other metadata in collection workflow to segregate or tag them?
• Do you download and store process management reports for tracking and defensibility?
  • If so, which reports and where to store them?

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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View my take on those with potential eDiscovery Impact and my comments at my Roadmap table. Although nothing new on the new Purview Portal Hub UI, I encourage everyone to start testing and exploring it. I am still occasionally finding the navigation bug, so if you still see the old Premium UI to use this link –  https://purview.microsoft.com/ediscovery/casespage – to directly access the new portal.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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Highlights:

• Walgreens’s previously used another cloud legal hold platform but found that Relativity’s Legal Hold module offered better automation, workflow and integration with Microsoft Purview. That made the migration effort worthwhile.
• Their initial interest in RelativityOne was focused on M365 collection automation.
• Use a threshold matter model where the case size/risk determines whether it is eligible for in-place selective criteria collections vs. processing full custodial collections in the Relativity ECA stage.
  • eDJ: I love that this highlights the fact that one eDiscovery approach does not fit all matters.
• 75%+ volume reductions for full collections staged in the ECA workspace through analytics and counsel scoping criteria.
  • eDJ: This aligns with 80-90% reductions seen in eDJ clients who invest in aggressive scoping and selective criteria development.
• Worth diligence on Purview security role-based access controls. The default Purview roles may not exactly match Azure EntraID roles or groups.
• Microsoft 365 is now charging for unlicensed OneDrive storage. Customers may have to reevaluate potential costs of departed custodians on legal hold.
  • eDJ: Working on specific information and guidance on what changes with departed custodians on legal hold.
• Recommends disclosure of your commercial litigation manual to shut down eDiscovery fights over process and quality.
  • eDJ: I call this the client eDiscovery Bible and recommend using versions with key stakeholders, retained counsel and even your auditors.
• Recommends creating a 1-pager guide to evaluate new matters and bucket workflow decisions.
  • eDJ: Nice to see this kind of clear counsel guidance kicking off new matters the right way.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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The unlimited analysis during the advanced access program enabled the Verizon team to run validation tests with aiR for Review on two previously coded matters. This complies with my ‘trust but verify’ approach to new technology. Overall, Kacey says that in one day, aiR for Review produced an 80% cost savings and a 98% match to the 5-month manual review. aiR for Privilege identified additional privileged documents (missed by a manual review team) and player nicknames in similar tests.

Highlights:

• aiR for Review testing was run against a data set previously coded by contract attorneys and used the original review protocols for consistency.
• Kacey says that aiR for Review can effectively eliminate first pass. Verizon still puts eyes on all documents, but now they have the right eyes on the key documents up front.
• In retrospect, manual review forces a simplistic set of issues and privilege calls that cannot compete with AI’s ability to apply almost infinite choices.
  • eDJ: AI breaks Miller’s Magical Number Seven limit of human short-term memory.
• The review highlights the responsive/privileged text, gives you the rationale and considerations. This allows the reviewer to quickly validate the recommendation.
• Use it on prior reviewed cases and look at the delta. A day or two with aiR will convince you that it produces better work product.
• “When you see how accurate aiR for Privilege is, it feels almost negligent not to use it.”
• aiR for Privilege takes a bit more time to load and tune your counsel lists.
• Kacey was looking forward to discussing workflow options and matter volume thresholds with other aiR users. The very large volume collections may require a more nuanced approach to control the analysis costs.
• aiR for Review is approachable. It does not take TAR experts to run it.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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The Past, Present, and Future of Mobile Data Collection and Review with Cellebrite and Relativity

I have been chasing practical solutions for enterprise-wide mobile device discovery for more than a decade. I went into the session with high hopes that Cellebrite could now deliver touch-free preservation and collection for my client’s frequent fliers and compliance investigations. Relativity Collect’s side of the integration delivered on automated ingestion of Relativity Short Message Format (RSMF) message content into the target workspace. The reality check is that Cellebrite Endpoint Inspector still requires the user to physically connect the unlocked phone to a laptop or desktop running the collection app. A more feasible custodian driven collection of mobile content does address many customer scenarios. It is a good step forward. I hope to see other mobile collection solutions with similar Relativity integrations, but Cellebrite seems to think they have Relativity locked up.

The presenters and customers did an excellent job explaining the workflow, features and current limitations. My highlights below. Cellebrite documentation is only accessible to active customers, so I was not able to verify some limitations.

• Workflow can be triggered from Relativity Collect and requires Cellebrite Endpoint Inspector licensing to send the email with app link.
• The custodian installs the app (assuming their endpoint is not locked down) and attaches the unlocked mobile device to start collection. Supported chat content is converted to RSMF and collected to workspace for processing. A full .UFD image is collected with native mobile content that can be processed separately by Cellebrite.
  • eDJ: The raw source physical acquisition instead of more flexible selective collection has proven to have cost and privacy impact. The current solution feels more suitable for approved cloud instant message collection such as WhatsApp or WeChat.
• The solution allows the custodian to manage the collection start timing, but it is not recommended to use the device during collection.
• App content from the collected .UFD image must be extracted by Cellebrite before being uploaded to RelativityOne for processing. There was some discussion about how the collection is not a full file system image and uses different access methods for Android/Apple devices. Devices with multiple profiles (personal/work) may require custodian actions and multiple collections.
• During the July advanced access program, customers experienced a general 60-70min collection time.
• This is available in the US currently; international support will be later.
• The collections do not yet support filters such as date ranges or participants.
• The overall solution seems to require minimal training for collection managers or custodians.
• No per device or source cost for collections.
  • eDJ: Makes sense for typical law firms and providers to manage remote collections. No individual cost beyond billable time and storage.

Hold and Collect in the Age of Generative AI and Explosive Data Growth

Managing the ‘upstream’ phases of discovery with rapidly evolving enterprise data sources is a challenge to corporate counsel and those who support them. Many of my clients adopted the Relativity Legal Hold module since introduction and some are finally getting to test the Collect functionality for M365. The Product Management team gave a pretty comprehensive overview of the new Collect app (released in January), the roadmap and the new Purview sync app. RelativityOne was ranked as the #1 hold platform on the 2024 G2 Grid Report. With over a petabyte of data collected through Collect in 2024, that is quite an accomplishment.

Preservation Application – Jan 2024

• Improved overall performance in retrieving and presenting M365 information
• New wizard merges project/preserve wizards into single
• Location sources – Added SharePoint and other M365 URL driven sources
  • eDJ – funny note. Relativity added URL targets just as the new Purview eDiscovery hub abandoned them for M365 Group ownership targets.
• New list population UI – much better/faster presentation of sources for selection
• Custom merge fields for notices from Project/Entity objects
• Added Google Workspace sources such as Gmail, Drive and Chat

Hold/Collect Roadmap:

• New APIs for matter management and more external integrations
• Expand default and cross matter reports
• Redefined error messages
  • eDJ: Getting real error messages from the M365 audit log is always tricky. As you will see below, they need to be translated unless you are an MSCE…
• Human readable feedback on errors

New app – Purview Sync

• Direct Purview Premium integration
  • eDJ: Will supplement this with specifics. I assume/hope that you will be able to see your Purview cases, search and review sets. Most importantly I hope that Relativity solves the missing hold volume metrics.
• 2025 Copilot usage/content collection
  • eDJ: I got a couple calls on this. The simple answer is that Purview can now collect user Copilot prompts and metrics. I assume that Relativity is working on adding that content and converting it to RSMF for review presentation.
• Review Set – HTML converted to RSMF with metadata for Teams chat
  • eDJ: Actively testing this and eagerly looking for a solution as I am finding lots of potential gotchas in the HTML chat format.
• Hyperlinked/collaborative files in collection
  • eDJ: Remember that you need Purview Premium (E5 user license) to reassemble collaborative content.
• 2025 – Collect API automation
  • eDJ: This is probably more for Relativity partners than corporate clients. I can see scenarios where they have aggregated technologies to tackle different sources and want it all to end up in the customer workspace.

e-Discovery State of the Union

The indomitable David Horrigan somehow elicited cogent perspectives on this year’s top trends from eDiscovery luminaries and three “judges.” If you have ever tried to moderate 10 highly opinionated professionals on one stage, you understand what a feat that is. The room was packed, and I hope that they give this session the big stage next year. Our panel was organized into Association vs. Media vs. Practitioners. Relativity recognized family losses amongst our ‘speaker family’ and the speakers competed for donations to the favorite charities of the departed. Myself and 3 more illustrious alumni speakers were tasked with selecting the winners, though this act of charity made all attendees winners.

Practitioner Perspectives

Stephanie Clerkin, Dir. Litigation Support, Korein Tillery – Weaponization of AI by the defense. Seeing delay or denial tactics leveraging the confusion around AI.

Scott Milner, Partner, Mogan Lewis – eDiscovery orders/agreements are being negotiated without access to the ESI. Scope should be flexible, but forms of collection/production should be agreed between parties. Do we even need formal agreements if technical professionals can agree on industry standards and defaults?

Amie Taal, Consultant, Stratagem Tech Solutions – New EU DORA act with focus on process and financial services for protection of customer information. New incident response reporting requirements. 1% of daily income as potential fines. CISO responsible. Extends to 3^rd party management. Goes into effect 1/27/2025.

Association Angles

Joy Heath Rush, CEO, ILTA – The need for an IG mindset to tackle eDiscovery. New ISO standards shaping requirements.

Maribel Rivera, VP of Strategy and Client Engagement, ACEDS – GenAI review tools will change discovery. 1^st pass review with AI will tackle increasing volumes. This still requires training, specialization and skills.

David Cohen, Partner, Reed Smith – Asserts the broader GenAI impact to sources and tools. The transition to Natural Language Prompt queries and enriched deposition preparation.

Media Mandates

Robert Ambrogi,  Editor, LawSites/LawNext – Called out GPT Stupidity as top trend. The lack of legal ethics and user skills lends itself to citation hallucinations and attorneys not doing their homework just like modern students.

Joe Patrice, Senior Editor, Above the Law – AI = Accessibility. GenAI transforms expert systems into user experience tools.

Ryan O’Leary, Research Director, IDC – Overall loss of trust in legal system, data integrity and privacy. The lack of AI regulation threatens user trust.

Stephanie Wilkins, Editor-in-Chief, Legaltech News (congrats on move to Director of Content for Legaltech Hub) – New generation of AI driven evidence. How do we know what is real? eDJ: Stephanie got my vote as I am seeing GenAI content already creep into collections.

The 11th Annual Judicial Panel: Politics, Free Speech, and the Judiciary

The Friday Judicial Panel got real this year as it tackled the politics and realities of judicial intimidation and influence. Judge Dr. Victoria McCloud has regularly brought us her perspectives from the UK High Court. She recently retired from the bench and cited increasingly real threats and social pressure. In light of the sensitive nature of some of the judges’ very open discussion, I will keep my highlights unattributed and appropriate. If you missed this session, you missed the chance to hear from the bench how ugly the social divide has gotten.

• Public perception is impacted by threats more than the actual judge’s opinions.
• Lack of civil education on the reality and role of law systems contributes to effectiveness of misinformation campaigns.
• Call on attorneys to defend the system and bench when judges cannot publicly respond.
• UK has no practical defense of judges’ safety. No enforcement of ethical standards of litigants or defense counsel. History of public attacks on courts since the founding of the country.
• Overall bench is more concerned over physical safety of staff and family than bias. Doxxing increasing as a common tactic.
• No public understanding of the ‘ladder of law’ – the bottom rung applies the law instead of making it. So regular state and federal judges are bound to enforce superior/supreme court case law rather than make their own.
• Threats have doubled recently. The nature of threats has shifted from cartels and organized crime to the mentally distressed and lone extremists.
• A judge’s job is to make one party unhappy. Polarization has become universal and words have consequences.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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First I made Shimmy give me his high level pitch:

ALTorney is continuously expanding its innovative self-service platform for legal talent sourcing and management. Renowned for providing transparent, direct, and rapid access to attorney populations for review and more, Altorney also boasts an impressive suite of management tools, including chat, e-forms, and Relativity integrations. These features facilitate:

• Easy user management
• Efficient time approval and reconciliation
• Advanced case metrics
• You can assemble your ideal dream team whenever you need them using the Favorites feature, and gain valuable insights and metrics at the organizational, case, and reviewer levels.

Now my takeaways:

• Transparent, flat 25% cost on top of attorney rate for billing, invoices and administrative services
• Match immediately on availability, rates, areas of expertise, languages, certifications/platforms, conflicts and other facets to bypass the tedium of CV review
• Maintain a list of ‘favorite’ reviewers and easily invite known talent to payroll through platform with a single email.
• Staff your project without sales reps and all the usual communication overhead
• Now that the platform is proven with reviewers they are looking to expand to project managers and other areas of expertise
• Nifty Uber-style 2 way rating system
• International expansion with customers and review pools in UK, EU countries, Canada and more

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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327 Updates – 202 in development – 34 rolling out – 83 launched

The new Purview eDiscovery portal has rolled out to some tenants in preview mode. The Purview PM team briefed me on it back at LegalWeek and it finally arrived at my test tenant this week. They have definitely gone for a simplified workflow and ‘eliminated’ the Collection searches. Unfortunately, legal holds are not yet present in my version, so there is a lot left to do before the impending end of year decommissioning of the classic UI. I will be publishing a new blog and Geek Guide on the new portal asap. For now, do not panic when you cannot find your ‘All sites’ options! They are now a pull down when you click in the search field. Per the roadmap entries below and at the permanent table here, the have surfaced a lot more metadata and even generated property fields that may be useful for items in the review set. You have a LOT more options when promoting a search to review set (i.e. making a copy and reprocessing for advanced indexing, OCR and ‘analytics’). There are also a lot of new export options that are worth testing. My initial tests had a lot of issues, but I will withhold substantial comments until I have replicated testing in a client tenant (upcoming project!).

Showing 1 to 17 of 17 entries (filtered from 2,828 total entries)

Want to meet with me at RelativityFest 2024 in Chicago? Grab a slot on my calendar here: https://calendly.com/gregbuckles/relfest2023

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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I tend to break the approaches into meaning vs. pattern based. Until TAR/machine learning, our analytic technologies focused on organizing raw data and reducing irrelevant content. Even using machine learning to prioritize and identify key evidence was all about cost/time reduction. Now we are testing nacent artificial technologies like RAG to deliver generative ‘answers’ and higher level insights to datasets from simple query prompts. While that does not comprise ‘wisdom’ in my eyes, it does augment human decisions and understanding in new ways.

For those wanting a more detailed comparison of the two primary approaches, this Copilot prompt response was pretty spot on to a non-academic in the tech trenches. As always, verify any AI generated content before relying on it.

Knowledge-Based AI

Knowledge-Based AI focuses on representing and utilizing knowledge to perform tasks. This approach involves encoding human knowledge into a form that AI systems can understand and reason with. Key aspects include:

1. Knowledge Representation:
   • Declarative Knowledge: Facts and information about the world, often represented using logic-based formalisms¹.
   • Procedural Knowledge: Instructions on how to perform tasks, encoded as rules or algorithms¹.
   • Meta-Knowledge: Knowledge about the structure and organization of other knowledge¹.
2. Reasoning and Inference:
   • AI systems use logical reasoning to draw conclusions from the knowledge they possess.
   • Techniques like semantic networks, frames, and ontologies help in organizing and processing knowledge².
3. Applications:
   • Expert systems, natural language processing, and decision support systems rely heavily on knowledge-based AI².

Information-Based AI

Information-Based AI focuses on processing and analyzing large volumes of data (information) to identify patterns and make predictions. This approach is often associated with machine learning and data-driven techniques. Key aspects include:

1. Data Processing:
   • AI systems analyze raw data to extract useful information.
   • Techniques like statistical analysis, clustering, and classification are commonly used³.
2. Learning from Data:
   • Machine learning algorithms learn patterns and relationships from data without explicit programming.
   • Deep learning, a subset of machine learning, uses neural networks to process vast amounts of information and make complex predictions⁴.
3. Applications:
   • Image and speech recognition, recommendation systems, and predictive analytics are typical applications of information-based AI⁴.