If you somehow missed the September 11, 2020 announcement (MC223426) or January’s (MC199461) admin message, Microsoft has now effectively disabled any legal matters you have in the original Advanced eDiscovery (designated v1.0). You can manually export the data, but I have yet to find any reports or convenience features that would enable a lonely litsupport manager to dump out a list of matters, custodians, collections and history. Worse yet, there is NO migration available to move or recreate matters in the new Advanced eDiscovery v2.0 module. While I understand that migrations are always tricky and require more resources than expected, this is Microsoft and we expect better.
Many or most of my clients use Core eDiscovery to place holds and do raw custodial exports to their managed service provider or retained counsel. The volume and UI limitations of the v1.0 UI kept it from being widely used outside of Microsoft’s legal department and SMB customers whose discovery volumes worked within the constraints. I am glad to see the vast improvements promised by the new UI. However, I can see this coming as a nasty shock to small legal departments who have been using Advanced eDiscovery because their company paid the E5 or Advanced Compliance license for their relatively small caseload. These announcements were only published to system admins. Few IT admins would understand the impact of matters being frozen mid review.
There are a lot of moving pieces in this push to get users onto the new Advanced eDiscovery 2.0 UI, so stay tuned for some deep dives in coming days. I apologize for missing the January notice, but I was buried in engagements and had not relaunched the Journal way back then.
Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Contact him directly for a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.
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