Microsoft 365
Business Premium Teams Rooms: Affordable SMB Conference Solutions
Discover Business Premium Teams Rooms for SMBs. Learn how affordable conference room AV solutions transform meetings into seamless collaboration experiences.
Legal challenges and investigations are inevitable in today’s business environment. Whether it’s a regulatory audit, civil lawsuit, or internal investigation, your organization must be ready to preserve electronic evidence quickly and defensibly.
Microsoft 365 E3 includes powerful compliance features such as litigation hold and eDiscovery, allowing organizations to place content on hold, search data across workloads, and support legal teams all without third-party tools.
This guide breaks down how to use E3’s capabilities to meet legal requirements, protect data, and streamline your eDiscovery process.
A litigation hold is a legal obligation to preserve all relevant data once an organization becomes aware of a potential lawsuit or regulatory inquiry. Under Microsoft 365 E3, this includes:
Once placed on hold, this content is immune to deletion, even if users try to erase it. This protects the organization from spoliation (the legal term for destroying evidence) and ensures full compliance with discovery rules.
With Microsoft 365 E3, you can apply two types of legal hold:
Applied directly to an Exchange mailbox. It preserves:
A more advanced option using Core eDiscovery. This type of hold can target content in:
You can scope these holds by user, keyword, date range, or specific content types.
eDiscovery refers to the process of identifying, preserving, searching, and exporting digital content for legal proceedings. Microsoft 365 E3 includes Core eDiscovery, which allows you to:
This makes Core eDiscovery ideal for HR investigations, contract disputes, compliance audits, and early case assessment.
Follow these steps in the Microsoft 365 admin center or Exchange Online PowerShell:
Set-Mailbox -Identity "user@domain.com" -LitigationHoldEnabled $true
This preserves mailbox content indefinitely (or for the duration you specify) and is invisible to end users.
To create a case and apply a targeted eDiscovery hold:
This enables granular legal preservation without impacting unrelated data.
With a properly scoped Core eDiscovery hold, Microsoft 365 preserves:
All this content is indexed and searchable through Core eDiscovery’s review tools, enabling a complete legal review from a single interface.
| Feature | Core eDiscovery (E3) | Advanced eDiscovery (E5) |
|---|---|---|
| Search across M365 data | ✅ | ✅ |
| Create holds | ✅ | ✅ |
| Export data | ✅ | ✅ |
| Custodian management | ❌ | ✅ |
| Machine learning (themes, relevance) | ❌ | ✅ |
| Legal review tagging | Basic | Advanced |
| Audit and activity analytics | Limited | Extensive |
For most small to midsize businesses, Core eDiscovery in E3 is enough. If your legal team needs advanced automation, E5 may be a better fit.
Use litigation hold as soon as:
Once triggered, a litigation hold must be applied immediately to avoid evidence loss and legal penalties.
All activity around holds and eDiscovery cases is logged in Microsoft Purview’s audit trails.
With Microsoft 365 E3, organizations can confidently respond to legal and regulatory demands without external software or complex infrastructure. Whether you’re a law firm, healthcare provider, financial institution, or enterprise, litigation hold and Core eDiscovery give you the ability to preserve and manage sensitive content with speed and precision.
These tools are not just for IT, they empower legal, compliance, and HR teams to take control of information governance and reduce risk.
Ready to Preserve Evidence and Prepare for Legal Discovery?
Use Microsoft 365 E3 to apply litigation holds, manage eDiscovery, and protect your business in legal scenarios. Built-in compliance, ready when you need it.
Discover Business Premium Teams Rooms for SMBs. Learn how affordable conference room AV solutions transform meetings into seamless collaboration experiences.
Discover how E5 Power BI Pro enables advanced analytics. Learn to build insightful Power BI dashboards and transform data into strategic decisions.
Learn how E3 shared mailboxes enable cost-effective collaboration. Discover shared inbox setup tips and license optimization strategies for Microsoft 365.