Jan 19, 20234 min read

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery solutions

Updated: Jun 5

Electronic discovery, or eDiscovery, is the process of identifying and delivering electronic information that can be used as evidence in legal cases. You can use eDiscovery tools in Microsoft Purview to search for content in Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Groups, and Yammer Teams. You can search mailboxes and sites using the same eDiscovery search and export the search results. You can use Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Standard) cases to identify, hold, and export content found in mailboxes and sites. If your organization has an Office 365 E5 or Microsoft 365 E5 subscription (or related E5 add-on subscriptions), you can further manage custodians and analyze content using the feature-rich Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Premium) solution in Microsoft 365.

eDiscovery solutions

Microsoft Purview provides three eDiscovery solutions: Content search, eDiscovery (Standard), and eDiscovery (Premium).

Content Search	eDiscovery (Standard)	eDiscovery (Premium)
- Search for content - Keyword queries and search conditions - Export search results - Role-based permissions	- Search and export - Case management - Legal hold	- Custodian management - Legal hold notifications - Advanced indexing - Review set filtering - Tagging - Analytics - Predictive coding models And more...

Content search

Use the Content search tool to search for content across Microsoft 365 data sources and then export the search results to a local computer.

eDiscovery (Standard)

eDiscovery (Standard) builds on the basic search and export functionality of Content search by enabling you to create eDiscovery cases and assign eDiscovery managers to specific cases. eDiscovery managers can only access the cases of which they're members. eDiscovery (Standard) also lets you associate searches and exports with a case and place an eDiscovery hold on content locations relevant to the case.

eDiscovery (Premium)

The eDiscovery (Premium) tool builds on the existing case management, preservation, search, and export capabilities in eDiscovery (Standard). eDiscovery (Premium) provides an end-to-end workflow to identify, preserve, collect, review, analyze, and export content responsive to your organization's internal and external investigations. It lets legal teams manage custodians and the legal hold notification workflow to communicate with custodians involved in a case. It allows you to collect and copy data from the live service into review sets, when you can filter, search, and tag content to cull non-relevant content from further review so your workflow can identify and focus on the most relevant content. eDiscovery (Premium) provides analytics and machine learning-based predictive coding models to narrow down the scope of your investigation to the most relevant content.

Comparison of key capabilities

Capability	Content search	eDiscovery (Standard)	eDiscovery (Premium)
Search for content
Keyword queries and search conditions
Search Statistics
Export search results
Role-based permissions
Case management
Place content locations on legal hold
Custodian management
Legal hold notifications
Advanced indexing
Error remediation
Review sets
Support for cloud attachments and SharePoint versions
Optical character recognition
Conversation threading
Collection of statistics and reports
Review set filtering
Tagging
Analytics
Predictive coding models
Computed document metadata
Transparency of long-running jobs
Export to customer-owned Azure Storage location

eDiscovery (Standard) in Microsoft Purview

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Standard) in Microsoft Purview provides a basic eDiscovery tool that organizations can use to search and export content in Microsoft 365 and Office 365. You can also use eDiscovery (Standard) to place an eDiscovery hold on content locations, such as Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts, and Microsoft Teams. Nothing is needed to deploy eDiscovery (Standard). Still, there are some prerequisite tasks that an IT admin and eDiscovery manager must complete before your organization can start using eDiscovery (Standard) to search, export, and preserve content.

This article discusses the steps necessary to set up eDiscovery (Standard). This includes ensuring the proper licensing required to access eDiscovery (Standard) and place an eDiscovery hold on content locations, as well as assigning permissions to your IT, legal, and investigation teams so they can access and manage cases. This article also provides a high-level overview of using cases to search for and export content.

eDiscovery (Standard) workflow

eDiscovery (Premium) in Microsoft Purview

The Microsoft Purview eDiscovery (Premium) solution builds on the existing Microsoft eDiscovery and analytics capabilities. eDiscovery (Premium) provides an end-to-end workflow to preserve, collect, analyze, review, and export content responsive to your organization's internal and external investigations. It also lets legal teams manage the entire legal hold notification workflow to communicate with custodians involved in a case.

eDiscovery (Premium) capabilities

eDiscovery (Premium) can help your organization respond to legal matters or internal investigations by discovering data where it lives. You can seamlessly manage eDiscovery workflows by identifying persons of interest and their data sources, seamlessly applying holds to preserve data, and then managing the legal hold communication process. By collecting data from the source, you can search the live Microsoft 365 platform to quickly find what you need. Intelligent machine learning capabilities such as deep indexing, email threading, and near-duplicate detection also help you reduce large volumes of data to a relevant data set.

The following sections describe how these eDiscovery (Premium) capabilities can help your organization.

eDiscovery subscription comparison

The following sections show the minimum subscription requirements for Content search, eDiscovery (Standard), and eDiscovery (Premium). Subscriptions that support eDiscovery (Standard) also support Content search. Subscriptions that support eDiscovery (Premium) also support Content search and eDiscovery (Standard).