Microsoft 365 features some of the world’s top collaboration and cloud-based services for businesses. While advanced collaboration has dramatically increased the productivity of workers and corporations alike, it also has created a challenge for legal teams to review collaboration data for internal investigations or litigation.
Enterprise Connection
As a result, corporate counsel and law firms are always looking for ways to simplify and speed the discovery process around data from today’s major communication and collaboration tools. This is why Casepoint developed the technology to support this need and offer an enterprise Microsoft 365 connector to our Casepoint eDiscovery suite. It simplifies the eDiscovery data collection process in Microsoft 365.
Preservation and Collection
Casepoint has the ability to preserve — via our expanded legal hold capabilities — all kinds of data from key enterprise systems, including Google Vault, Microsoft 365, Slack Enterprise, Box Enterprise, and more. This ability to preserve data in place is important for reducing both the costs and the risks inherent in moving data around, but it doesn’t reduce the legal teams’ options. When it’s time for collection, clients can either use the preservation copy or create a fresh copy of the data.
Discretion is often a key priority of internal investigations. With Casepoint, gone are the days of needing to inform individuals one-by-one that collection is taking place and obtain permissions to view their data. Reviewers can undertake eDiscovery data collection in Microsoft 365 at an enterprise-administrator level. This capability, which is more efficient and far less disruptive, is particularly advantageous in internal investigations.
Where Microsoft and Casepoint Intersect
Microsoft’s Purview and compliance toolkits can initiate actions that preserve or hold data on request, but they do not process that data for review or production.
Casepoint takes over at this point. With our end-to-end legal discovery platform, legal teams can communicate with these Microsoft tools, request data preservation, and align with data holds. Then it’s time to search, filter, collect, and process the data, and make it available for attorneys to review and act upon. Teams can refine data by specific custodians or dates, or by conducting a full-text search using Casepoint’s built-in artificial intelligence and advanced analytics.
In a nutshell, while Microsoft provides a basic eDiscovery toolkit that organizes and keeps track of data preservation and hold requests, Casepoint empowers users to quickly filter and shape large volumes of data, reducing it to a set of intelligently organized and potentially relevant documents that can be quickly reviewed and acted on by a legal team. In a real-world example, this might translate to Casepoint enabling a team of 100 attorneys to simultaneously review the data and potentially produce it in a court of law at a fraction of the cost and time involved versus the manual review process.
User-Friendly
Bearing in mind the pressures on legal teams’ time and resources, our Casepoint interface is designed to be the most user-friendly and intuitive in the business, so legal departments don’t have to wait for the IT group or external collection agency to search out and review the relevant data. Non-technical users can easily and quickly filter and parse data, and then preview results on their own — before collection — to ensure that their team won’t waste time downstream in the discovery process reviewing irrelevant data. This is something no other platform allows, and it’s an important new benefit that saves review time, optimizes resources, and reduces costs in each new matter.
Getting the Most Out of Casepoint
Good preparation is key to making data collection work best for you. Here are four tips for making the most of Casepoint’s capabilities:
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Leverage the power of enterprise-level authorization to avoid having to seek individual permissions.
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Familiarize yourself with the basic parameters of the collection ahead so you can apply the most relevant filters to refine your search results.
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Carefully select the collection time frame.
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Review collection query results before triggering the collection itself.
Conclusion
We’re experiencing a great deal of interest and activity around our newly available connectors for Microsoft 365 and we encourage all our users to give them a test drive.
As further Microsoft APIs become available, we will rapidly add them to the Casepoint platform. As always, we are committed to ensuring you will always have highly functional and timely connectors for the entire Microsoft 365 product grouping.