Arlington, Virginia · Washington DC, Maryland & Nationwide
Pro-Legal Services, Inc. performs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery collections, Microsoft 365 eDiscovery, Teams data collection, SharePoint and OneDrive collection, and Exchange Online collection for law firms, corporate legal departments, and government agencies. Microsoft has been retiring the classic eDiscovery experience in favor of Purview, and the practical consequence for litigation teams is that collection workflows built against the old interface need revisiting.
What Actually Changed
The product naming moved from Microsoft 365 eDiscovery to Purview eDiscovery, with Standard and Premium tiers. The search, hold, and export functions survived the transition, but the interface, the permissions model, and the export behavior did not survive it unchanged. Collection instructions written for the classic experience are the ones to check first.
Why It Matters for a Live Matter
Three things reach litigation directly. Export formats and the structure of what comes out of a collection changed, which affects load files and downstream processing. Permissions and role assignments were reorganized, so the account that could run a collection last year may not be the account that can run one now. And organizations that never migrated are collecting against a deprecated workflow without necessarily knowing it.
What We Ask Before a Purview Collection
Which licensing tier the client holds, because Premium features including advanced indexing and review sets are not available at every level. Whether the tenant has fully migrated. Who holds the eDiscovery Manager role and whether that account has access to every custodian in scope. Whether chat, Teams meeting content, and short-message data are in scope, because those collect differently from mail and have their own format considerations. And what the ESI protocol says about any of it.
The Detail Most Collections Miss
A Purview search returns what the index has. Items that failed indexing, were only partially indexed, or sit in formats the indexer does not handle do not appear in the result and do not announce themselves. We check the partially indexed and unindexed item reports as part of every collection and tell you what fell outside the search, because a collection that silently excluded material is worse than one that visibly missed it.
How We Handle It
We run targeted cloud collection from Microsoft Purview and Microsoft 365 alongside endpoint, mobile, and email collection, under documented chain of custody with hash verification and a per-source record of the method used. Collections feed directly into ESI processing, managed document review and AI document review on Relativity, RelativityOne, or our in-house Questa platform, and into defensible production. One named contact, 24/7/365.
Related reading: our article on forensic data collection services covers the full source range, chain of custody for digital evidence covers where collections fail, and cross-border discovery covers overseas custodians and foreign-language records.
We run Microsoft Purview and Microsoft 365 collections remotely and on site across Washington DC, Maryland, and Virginia, including Alexandria, Fairfax, Tysons, Northern Virginia, Richmond, Bethesda, Rockville, Silver Spring, Baltimore, and Annapolis, and for matters nationwide, including New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, Miami, and Wilmington.
Collecting from Microsoft 365 or Purview? Contact Pro-Legal Services, Inc., 1550 Wilson Blvd, Suite 250, Arlington, VA 22209, at info@pro-legal.com or 202-955-9400. Tell us the tenant setup and the custodians and we will tell you what is collectable and what is not. Available 24/7/365.