If you own the E5 license within Microsoft Office 365, you may be wondering how to take advantage of all the features that you have purchased.

One of these features is called Advanced eDiscovery. This comes from an acquisition of a company called Equivio, that had specialized machine learning technology to reduce the time and costs for eDiscovery between 75% to 90%.

Equivio was designed to solve a problem where you have a million documents to analyze to determine whether they are relevant to a legal case. When dealing with large, unstructured data sets, this tool can be quite effective to reduce the total number of documents that need to be reviewed by a human.

In my opinion, this tool should be used in cases where you have a LOT of search results that come back from the initial search query. Otherwise, if you only have a handful of documents that are returned, it is not necessary to use this advanced tool since you don’t have the problem that the tool was designed to solve.

What data can it search?

Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Skype for Business.

How does it work?

One of the features of Equivio is the use of ‘predictive coding’ which is a technique of watching how you tag documents as relevant to the case or not relevant on a small subset of search results, and then the machine learning algorithm can use this to filter out noise and reduce the total number of documents that truly need to be reviewed. In one case, defendants were able to reduce the number of documents that had to be reviewed by humans from 2 million documents to just 10 percent of that original number. Imagine the cost savings in legal fees!

The software also identifies duplicate files and email threads, which further reduces the costs involved in analyzing search results.

How do I find Advanced eDiscovery in Office 365?

At the time of this writing, Equivio Analytics (now dubbed Advanced eDiscovery) can be found in the Office 365 Compliance Center here:
https://compliance.protection.outlook.com

Then on the left navigation pane click eDiscovery. In the middle pane click ‘Go to Equivio Analytics.’ (as shown in screen shot below).

The first time you browse there, you will be prompted to submit a request to enable Equivio, and that it could take up to 24 hours for this to take effect.

In the future, this will be moved to the new Protection Center here:https://protection.office.com but at the time of this writing, Equivio is not yet accessible in the new Protection Center portal, so just use the existing Compliance Center for now.

Note: Before you get started, you need permissions. To access the eDiscovery cases page in the Compliance Center, you have to be a member of the eDiscovery Manager role group in the Compliance Center. For more information about permissions, see Permissions in the Office 365 Compliance Center.

In my next blog article, I will show you the user interface and integration with the Compliance Center. Click (here) for part 2 in this series.

Need help with your next Office 365 Project? Contact us at [email protected]