Microsoft Purview eDiscovery Premium Implementation

No, and no — and we put it this bluntly because the boundary protects you. IT Partner is a Microsoft consultancy, not a law firm: we configure eDiscovery Premium, build the workflows, and train your team, but we never conduct the legal review, never make privilege or responsiveness calls, and never provide legal advice. Every workflow we build routes those judgments to your counsel by design. If a vendor offers to both run your platform and exercise legal judgment inside it, ask them which license they do that under.

The Premium capability comes with Microsoft 365 E5, A5, or G5, or is added to E3-level licensing via the E5 Compliance add-on or the narrower E5 eDiscovery and Audit add-on. There is a second rule that surprises people: users whose data you place under hold as custodians must themselves be licensed at that level — while the case managers, lawyers, and reviewers working the case do not need an E5-level license at all. We verify both the tenant entitlement and your intended custodian population on day one, before configuration starts.

No — only the people whose data goes under Premium holds as custodians. A common pattern in litigation-heavy organizations is E5-level licensing for the populations most likely to become custodians — executives, finance, sales leadership — with the rest of the tenant on E3. The assessment maps your realistic custodian population against your licensing and names any gap plainly, so the licensing decision is made on facts rather than on a worst case.

The operational layer that makes discovery defensible at scale: custodian management with associated data sources, hold notifications with tracked acknowledgments, reminders, and escalations, advanced indexing of partially indexed content, collections with estimates, and review sets — a working space where near-duplicate detection, email threading, and theme analytics cut the volume your reviewers actually read. Standard-tier eDiscovery gives you cases, holds, searches, and exports; Premium turns that into a process a legal team can run and defend.

A review set is a static, secured working copy of collected content inside the case — the collection is committed to it, and from that point your reviewers query, tag, annotate, and analyze without touching the live mailboxes and sites the data came from. That separation is precisely what counsel wants: a stable corpus with analytics (threading, near-duplicates, themes) that reduces review volume, and a place where tagging conventions — which we configure and teach — organize the work before anything is exported or produced.

Scale and permanence. Search Assistance is us running one defensible search for you — scope, search, summary report, results — the right size for an occasional request. This engagement builds the standing capability: permissions, case structure, custodian and hold workflows, review sets, and a trained legal/IT pair, so discovery is something your organization does rather than something it buys one search at a time. If holds arrive more than occasionally, the build pays for itself quickly.

Microsoft retired the classic eDiscovery experiences in 2025 and consolidated everything into the unified eDiscovery experience in the Purview portal — content searches now live inside cases, and the case workflow changed materially. Teams trained on the classic pages genuinely do need the updated workflow, which is part of why the training sessions and runbook target the current experience and teach the process rather than the screenshots.

Retention policies apply to broad content classes on a schedule, for governance; a legal hold preserves specific custodians and sources indefinitely because of a specific matter, and it overrides deletion — including deletion a retention policy would otherwise perform — for the data in its scope. The two interact in ways that are documented but genuinely non-obvious, and holds are not retroactive to data deleted before they applied, which is why speed from trigger to hold matters. The policy workshop covers these interactions explicitly; broader retention design is the separate Data Lifecycle Management engagement.

Yes — Teams chat and channel content for custodians can be preserved by holds and collected into review sets, where threading makes conversations reviewable, subject to Microsoft's documented behaviors for how chat data is stored and processed. The pilot case can include Teams content deliberately, because chat is where modern matters increasingly live and where your team should see the workflow before a real deadline does.

They turn 'we told people to preserve documents' into evidence. When a custodian is added, the platform issues your hold notice, tracks acknowledgment, sends reminders on the schedule you set, and escalates non-responders — all recorded in the case. We configure the templates in your language and tone, with your counsel approving the wording, and the acknowledgment-tracking view becomes the artifact your legal team checks instead of a spreadsheet and hope.

The platform side, yes — as a separately quoted time-and-materials follow-on we can drive collections, review-set mechanics, and exports for specific matters when your team is stretched. The boundary never moves, though: custodian selection on real matters, privilege and responsiveness review, and every other legal judgment remain with your counsel. The implementation is deliberately built so you do not depend on us for routine cases; the follow-on exists for surge, not for substitution.

Purview eDiscovery reaches Microsoft 365 data, and this engagement is honest about that edge: file servers, local devices, and third-party systems are outside its collection reach. For most Microsoft-centric organizations that covers the bulk of discoverable material; for matters that span other systems, your counsel will need collection tooling or vendors for those sources, and the runbook names the boundary so it is planned for rather than discovered mid-matter.