With Microsoft retiring their Advanced eDiscovery v.1, some related PowerShell cmdlets and soon the Core eDiscovery interface, I asked the Relativity team for a briefing on how these changes might affect my clients using RelativityOne for in-place holds and collections. Overall I am happy to understand that the Microsoft-Relativity relationship is active and strong. The Relativity Legal Holds team has been aware of Microsoft’s push from cmdlet to the Graph API. The MSFT product management team is working hard on the beta Graph eDiscovery API, but many critical functions are not available for testing yet. Thus Relativity and most other eDiscovery platforms with M365 integrations will continue to use the PS cmdlets for now, but for collections, Relativity does take advantage of the Graph API where the API has functionality that is suitable for eDiscovery.
Why should you care how your eDiscovery portal connects to your custodian data sources? Because all APIs and work around connections come with limitations that can come back to haunt you. Every item has multiple date fields (created, sent, received, viewed…). When you say that you want everything within a date range, do you run that search on each individual field? I thought not. A decade ago it would not have occurred to me that Microsoft might retire entire modules, APIs or cmdlets without a well defined migration path for users and partners. That slow but stable Microsoft is gone (or never existed according to some of my peers). The new cloud Microsoft is moving fast and not looking back. So eDiscovery practitioners must step up our game to keep track every repository holding our custodian’s ESI.
Circling back to my briefing, Relativity was well aware of the changes. The Relativity Legal Hold will shift to the Graph eDiscovery API calls after they are launched and tested in production. Relativity’s approach seems to be a ‘better together’ integration that supports customers with more complex litigation profiles. That is why users can see the M365 in-place legal holds applied through Relativity Legal Hold module from the Core eDiscovery interface. Eventually I would like to see all external cases, holds, searches or exports initiated from external partner platforms logged in the M365 eDiscovery tables. We are not there yet, but at least Relativity Legal Hold customers can relax a bit.
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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