Microsoft Purview No Longer Shows Legal Hold History for Custodians

The August 2025 move to a “new eDiscovery experience” in Purview (previously Microsoft 365, or M365) has attracted a lot of unwanted attention from users. Previously, we covered the inability to create and send legal hold notices in the system, and now another shortcoming has surfaced: historical data for legal hold custodians is now gone.

Let’s take a closer look at what changed and what it means for visibility and defensibility.

What Changed for Purview Legal Holds

The user interface shows who is on hold while it’s active.

But when you remove that person, they’re gone. They no longer appear in the interface. In fact, there’s no record showing that they were ever on hold.

The historical information disappears in the redesigned interface. As a result, custodian timelines and context are harder to trace. Teams are unable to cleanly track when someone was placed on hold, when they were released, or prove that their data was preserved during a specific time window. Digging into logs and custom engineering may be required to find the information that teams were used to accessing easily.

Why This Is a Defensibility Problem

Companies need to be able to demonstrate when a custodian’s data was preserved.

This person was on multiple holds from January 2021 to April 2023, we released them from their last hold in April 2023, and therefore we were justified in purging their data after they left the company in February 2024.

If the date is gone — or at least hard to find — it’s difficult to prove a preservation window after the fact.

Think about what that means. Because the information isn’t surfaced in Purview, any real reporting ends up being something your IT team has to build. You’re relying on custom reports, logs, or workarounds just to answer basic questions.

• Who was on hold?

• When?

• For how long?

That’s not something legal staff can manage directly. It creates friction, slow response times, and increased risk.

What Legal Teams Can Do About It

A consequence of the new Purview interface is that teams are often left needing to create their own record of custodian hold activity, adding manual effort and often involving IT. However, of course, the best solution isn’t a workaround.

Like we discussed in previous blogs about M365 removing legal hold communications with custodians and how M365 isn’t the answer for eDiscovery, there are several shortcomings surrounding M365/Purview. The platform has never really been a great solution for legal holds or eDiscovery, and developments over the past several months for the redesigned tool have only reinforced that sentiment.

Organizations address these challenges with Casepoint, which integrates legal holds, preservation, and end-to-end eDiscovery into one AI-powered, secure platform. Instead of losing visibility when custodians are added to or removed from a hold, teams can clearly see who was preserved, when they were released, and maintain a complete, time-bound audit trail without involving IT.

Take a look at some highlights for Casepoint Legal Hold:

• Clear tracking of when custodians are placed on and released from legal holds, preserving defensible hold history

• Built-in reporting and dashboards that surface hold timelines without requiring custom reports or log analysis

• Integrated legal hold notices, reminders, and escalations with full accountability for communications

• Preservation across M365 and other enterprise systems, reducing gaps caused by tool-specific limitations

The Casepoint platform is trusted by the world’s largest enterprise and government organizations. Casepoint leads in terms of security standards and certifications — no other legal technology platform has achieved any of the following: FedRAMP® High or DOD Impact Level 5 or 6. Casepoint has achieved all three.