When Employee Terminations Go Off the Rails – Legal Discovery

We’ve all experienced it – an employee termination process goes off the rails and legal discovery ensues. This can occur at any time during the employee termination process, including prior to a termination.

Or, you may find yourself needing to do some legal discovery for merger and acquisition transactions, patent or copyright infringement investigations, etc.

Regardless of scope or the timing of legal discovery, you are presented with the daunting task of collecting Electronically Stored Information (ESI) in a process known as electronic discovery (eDiscovery).

But how do you do this in a cost-effective manner while still running your business, focusing on customer loyalty and improving your products and services?

Fortunately, Microsoft’s rapidly growing Office 365 suite of solutions includes Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery, which incorporates significant eDiscovery enhancements, including:

• High value, cost-effective eDiscovery of emails, files, Skype instant messages, and SharePoint sites
• Court approved machine learning solutions developed by Equivio, a company Microsoft acquired in early 2015
• Grouping of documents by themes (enhances the ability to review documents organized by theme/context)
• Improved review to recall ratio
• Email thread analysis including duplicate detection
• Litigation Hold and In-Place Hold of data to ensure that data remains preserved during eDiscovery activities
• Updated user guide on Microsoft TechNet

Here’s a snapshot of the features included in Equivio:

Since your company is legally responsible for providing ESI to legal counsel, you should be relieved that these improvements, also known as people-centric security, are available to you in the Microsoft Office 365 E5 subscription.  In addition, the E5 subscription includes data compliance solutions to improve your data archiving and auditing.  More information is available in the Office 365 Trust Center and in a recent people-centric security blog from Microsoft.

When legal discovery occurs at your company (and it will) contact FMT consultants by filling out the form below to help you with your Advanced eDiscovery needs.  Watch our Advanced eDiscovery webinar from March 16, 2016 to learn more.

Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery demo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPEGF3Auw_M

Written by:
Wade Walker
Director of IT Services