[Editor’s note: In a guest post here in August, e-discovery consultants Tom O’Connor, director of the Gulf Coast Legal Technology Center, and Don Swanson, president of Five Star Legal, launched the Microsoft Office 365 eDiscovery Challenge, a survey to determine whether Office 365’s e-discovery capabilities are up to the task of handling an e-discovery matter on a limited budget. In a November post, they presented the raw results. Today, they offer their summary and analysis of the survey results. The post is written by Tom and Don.]
By Tom O’Connor and Don Swanson
In August 2018, Don Swanson, president of Five Star Legal, and Tom O’Connor, director of the Gulf Coast Legal Technology Center, launched the Microsoft Office 365 eDiscovery Challenge, a survey to determine whether Office 365’s e-discovery capabilities are up to the task of handling an eDiscovery matter on a limited budget.
The survey was conducted over seven weeks from August 15 to October 15, 2018, using both an online SurveyMonkey tool and telephone interviews. We received a total of 75 survey responses from corporations, government agencies and law firms, with the breakdown of respondents being predominantly from corporate legal.
The survey is a follow-up to earlier works, first released ten years ago in 2009 by Craig D. Ball (EDna: Still Cheap and Challenged) and Tom O’Connor (To Edna and Beyond: The Ernie Challenge ), that presented hypothetical small and “tweener” sized cases and sought input about eDiscovery on a limited budget. Respondents to those challenges offered technology and methodology solutions designed to handle these cases on a restricted budget.
Raw data from the survey was first published on the Law Sites blog in November 2018. Office 365 implementations are growing rapidly and the Microsoft eDiscovery tools are both helpful and needed as law firms, corporations and government agencies are changing the way they manage eDiscovery activities. Here is
