Many organizations use Microsoft Purview for litigation hold and eDiscovery obligations. In 2025, Microsoft retired the legacy Legal Hold Communications capabilities in Purview eDiscovery, removing the built‑in workflows legal teams had used to issue, track, and escalate custodian legal hold notices, questionnaires, and acknowledgements.
This guide explains why Purview alone is no longer sufficient for defensible legal hold management and what leading legal and IT teams are (or should be) doing about it.
What Microsoft changed and why it matters
While the core ability to place M365 data on in-place hold remains, changes to Purview have altered workflows by eliminating the full-featured notice, reminder, and acknowledgement tracking capabilities. Legal teams can no longer rely on these tools for enterprise-scale litigation hold governance for complex or multi-matter environments.
For organizations with multiple matters and overlapping custodians, this change creates operational burdens, increases the risk of gaps in preservation and documentation, and forces teams to perform these activities manually or semi-manually. Beyond administrative effort, teams have lost the dedicated, end‑to‑end legal hold notification workflows and custodian‑centric history they previously relied on. They must now depend more on generic logs and custom reporting to reconstruct an audit trail.
For enterprises with multiple concurrent holds, this introduces risks such as:
- Premature releases: A user removed from one matter might be unintentionally released from others.
- Conflicting instructions: Notices may have inconsistent dates, instructions, or scope.
- Over-preservation: Holding unnecessary data increases cost and confusion.
Purview also lacks robust, cross‑matter analytics to monitor real‑time compliance or provide a consolidated export of audit‑ready documentation by custodian. These gaps elevate the risk of spoliation claims and other financial and reputational harm.
The go-forward approach for Purview users
Microsoft’s changes force a decision: accept Purview’s limitations or take steps to close those gaps. The path forward requires both Legal and IT to align on requirements and build a more defensible process. The process starts with two critical steps: defining requirements and identifying exactly where the gaps exist.
IT and Legal collaboration: aligning on requirements
Defining the right solution requires a cross‑functional requirements exercise across Legal (attorneys, support staff, and legal operations professionals) and IT. Over the years, IT has supported legal teams with data-related governance and operational related activities to improve litigation and investigation strategy and outcomes. In a recent survey of IT decision-makers, 39% of IT decision-makers identified legal hold process management as a key area of IT – Legal collaboration that is in full force.
In this capacity, the legal teams focus on designing defensible processes for notification, tracking, and reporting. IT is expected to implement and maintain technical workflows and integrations, often including APIs, scripts, or external platforms that sit alongside Purview. Together, Legal and IT must determine whether Purview’s current capabilities are appropriate given the matter’s stakes and regulatory environment.
Gap analysis: Identifying the defensible workflow
These decision-makers should define requirements and attempt to fill the gap left by Purview’s retired tools. This begins by mapping their current and desired legal hold workflows, creating user stories, and documenting how they had been using Purview eDiscovery Legal Hold Communications.
From there, a critical gap analysis can compare existing Purview capabilities against the workflow elements that must be in place. A few key questions should include:
- Can we see all custodial holds across matters centrally?
- Do you have automated reminders, or are they manual?
- Can you export an audit-ready record of all notices, acknowledgements, and releases by custodians?
- How do we prevent accidental releases when a custodian leaves one matter but remains on others?
For organizations with many concurrent matters, global custodians, or strict regulatory requirements, Purview alone is often insufficient. For example, legal and IT can agree that it is suitable to continue using Purview for native, in‑place preservation while dedicated legal hold software is best suited to provide robust, customizable hold notices, automated reminders and escalations, questionnaires, and acknowledgement tracking.
The solution: Advanced legal hold software
Therefore, the answer isn’t replacing Purview — it’s extending it with advanced communication, governance, and reporting capabilities it no longer provides. Organizations need an enterprise-grade legal hold solution that integrates with Purview, automating in-place preservation of M365 data while closing the gaps it leaves behind.
Simply put, a robust legal hold solution is required to complement Purview for richer notice management, multi‑matter awareness, unified custodian timelines, and advanced reporting.
OpenText Core Legal Hold is built to do exactly that. Key capabilities include:
- Synchronize custodian profiles bi-directionally with Purview via M365 APIs, Entra ID, or Active Directory, so holds automatically reflect job changes, departures, and location moves.
- Manage non-user data locations through multi-matter dashboards covering sites, shared mailboxes, and other data sources, complementing Purview’s in-place hold capabilities.
- Automate the legal hold lifecycle from issuing notices and questionnaires to tracking acknowledgments, scheduling reminders, and managing releases.
Gain superior legal hold workflow automation and auditability
While Purview provides an integrated experience within the M365 ecosystem, OpenText Core Legal Hold extends that experience by integrating with a broad set of enterprise data sources, including M365 and Purview. Our implementation ensures you can apply holds consistently across your critical data repositories, regardless of where your data resides.
By pairing Purview’s native preservation with a dedicated legal hold solution such as OpenText Core Legal Hold, organizations can achieve superior control, deeper automation, and more defensible reporting.
Ready to get started? Contact us to learn how OpenText Core Legal Hold can work for your organization.
