Microsoft Purview offers basic legal hold features. However, enterprise programs need more. They require governance, evidence, and scale. These needs go beyond just setting a preservation flag in Microsoft 365. Since Microsoft ended the classic eDiscovery experiences on August 31, 2025, organizations must now use eDiscovery (Premium). This change has shown problems with custodian engagement, automation, control across matters, and high-level reporting. The result is more manual work, weak defensibility, and rising hidden costs. 

Table of Contents: 

• What Legal Hold Capabilities Does Microsoft Purview Currently Provide?
• What Changed in Microsoft Purview in August 2025
• What’s the True Cost of “Included” in Purview, and How Does It Compare?
• How Does a Purpose-Built Platform Close These Gaps Without Abandoning Microsoft 365?
• How Does CaseFusion Enhance Your Program? 
• What is CaseFusion Legal Hold? 
• Frequently Asked Questions
  
  

What Legal Hold Capabilities Does Microsoft Purview Currently Provide?

Current Microsoft Purview legal hold capabilities include: 

• Place holds on Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams content 
• Create and manage eDiscovery cases (Premium Edition required) 
• Send basic hold notices via the Communications tool with simple acknowledgment tracking 
• Search and export held content inside Microsoft 365 

What Changed in Microsoft Purview in August 2025?

In August 2025, Microsoft retired the classic Content Search and classic eDiscovery (Standard/Premium) in Purview, consolidating activity in the modern eDiscovery (Premium) interface. Legal teams lost familiar workarounds and discovered missing capabilities essential for enterprise-scale hold governance (e.g., richer questionnaires, multi-matter safeguards, analytics). Legal teams are now expected to create defensible processes, consistent documentation, and measurable compliance across matters. Ad hoc workarounds that once sufficed are increasingly inadequate under new regulatory regimes and court scrutiny. 

Purview’s Communications tool can send notices and collect simple acknowledgments. However, it provides limited means to verify comprehension, gather structured information, or risk-score custodians.  

That’s a problem when auditors or courts ask whether your efforts were reasonable and proportionate. 

Typical gaps include: 

• No built-in questionnaires to capture  data sources (devices, SaaS apps, cloud drives) 
• No knowledge checks to confirm custodians actually understand obligations 
• No engagement or /risk scoring to flag non-responsive or high-risk custodians 
• No centralized analytics that tie responses to specific matters over time 

Why it matters: An “acknowledged” flag alone doesn’t prove custodians understood or preserved data, which can undermine you in depositions and audits.  
 
Without comprehension checks, structured questionnaires, and engagement analytics, you risk facing sanctions. You may also incur remediation costs and damage your reputation. Clear instructions and concrete preservation steps are important. These steps include pausing autodeletes and identifying non-Microsoft sources. 

How Big Is the Workflow Automation Gap for Real-World Programs?

Purview gives reminders and simple escalations. However, advanced programs need rules, events, and integrations. These keep holds in line with HR and IT needs. A good Legal Hold platform helps understand things like employment status and access permissions without spreadsheets. 

Enterprises typically require preservation workflows that incorporate conditional logic by country, role, or risk tier. These need to update automatically when employees join, leave, or change roles. They should also segment custodians across different matters and jurisdictions. If a workflow cannot be completed, they should trigger escalations based on the org chart. They also need to send alerts that highlight non-compliance early.  

Without these capabilities, teams spend double-digit hours each week chasing manual follow-ups and handling one-off exceptions. 

How Can Reporting and Analytics Escalate Into a Board-Level Risk?

Purview can show when a notice was sent and someone clicked “acknowledge.” However, legal ops and executives need trendlines, segmentation, and portfolio views. These tools help them understand and verify the current state of the legal hold process.  

This requires: 

• Real-time compliance rates across all matters 
• Acknowledgment and response times by department or region 
• Repeat non-compliers and high-risk custodians 
• Portfolio-level views (active holds, custodians per matter, time on hold) 
• Audit-ready documentation you can export in minutes 

If you’re assembling this manually each quarter, the process itself becomes a control weakness. 

How Fragile Is Multi-Matter and Cross-Custodian Control in Purview?

Enterprises often have custodians on multiple concurrent holds. Because Purview treats cases independently, you face risks such as: 

• Premature releases (removing a user from one matter and inadvertently from others) 
• Conflicting instructions (inconsistent notices, dates, or scopes) 
• Over-preservation (ballooning cost and confusion) 

The case-by-case model also creates blind spots for people who move, employees transferring roles, changing regions, or leaving the company.  

HR and IT events, like transfers and offboarding, can overlap with release decisions. This overlap can lead to accidentally removing a preservation control in one case that is still needed in another. Even good-intentioned “cleanups” of inactive mailboxes or Teams workspaces can accidentally limit an open investigation. This can happen if there isn’t a check for cross-matter dependencies. 

Example: A sales director is on five matters. An off-boarding ticket triggers mailbox closure and a request to release holds associated with the primary case.  

Without a multi-matter aware review, IT may process the release, causing preserved data to fall back to standard retention in the other four matters. Months later, a follow-on subpoena asks for the same director’s historic Teams chats, and only then does the gap surface. 

What do strong controls look like? At minimum, legal needs a unified custodian timeline that shows every matter, notice, scope, and release event for an individual; dependency-aware release protections that block (or at least warn about) removals when other active matters exist; and conflict detection that compares instructions across matters to flag scope drift and inconsistent dates before notices go out.

Can Purview Keep Up With Global Templates, Languages, and Branding?

Many legal teams need nuanced, jurisdiction-aware content, often in multiple languages with clear version control. Purview’s templates are serviceable but limited for: 

• Multi-language delivery from a single matter 
• Conditional content based on role, location, or matter type 
• Brand, layout, and approval workflows

Maintaining multiple “near-duplicate” cases for language or regulator-specific text invites version drift and administrative overhead. And above all, it is confusing for the custodians who receive similar-looking emails and instructions on a regular basis. 

What’s the True Cost of “Included” in Purview, and How Does It Compare?

Even if Purview is already licensed, the workarounds required for governance create real-time and risk costs, manual reminders, spreadsheet tracking, audit prep, and remediation when things slip. “Included” isn’t free if it drives labor, risk, and delays. The license line may be zero, but the operational burden can siphon dozens of hours per matter and expose you to sanctions if acknowledgments are missed, templates drift, or releases happen prematurely. 

True Cost Comparison

This is a true cost comparison for a typical mid-enterprise with 15–25 holds/year.

Bottom line: Prior spend shouldn’t justify ongoing inefficiency. When you account for labor and risk, a purpose-built platform often lowers the total cost of ownership while improving defensibility. 

So how do you capture these savings while keeping Microsoft 365 as your preservation layer? The next section shows how a purpose-built platform closes the gaps. 

How Does a Purpose-Built Platform Close These Gaps Without Abandoning Microsoft 365?

A dedicated legal hold platform will sit alongside Microsoft 365 and let Purview continue to handle preservation while you manage engagement, automation, and analytics in a system designed for governance. 

What Changes in Practice?

 Where Does CaseFusion Legal Hold Specifically Come In?

CaseFusion Legal Hold is a purpose-built companion that addresses the governance gaps identified above while preserving your Microsoft 365 investment. 

How Does CaseFusion Enhance Your Program? 

• Custodian engagement: built-in questionnaires, comprehension checks, engagement/risk scoring 
• Automation: AD/HR-aware rules, dynamic segmentation, intelligent reminders, multi-level escalations 
• Multimatter safety: unified custodian view, release protections, conflict detection 
• Reporting: portfolio dashboards, trendlines, drilldowns, audit-ready exports 
• Templates: multilingual variants, conditional content, versioning, brand control 

 Side-by-Side Snapshot of Purview versus CaseFusion Legal Hold

Should You Supplement Purview or Replace It Altogether?

If you already rely on Microsoft 365 for preservation, the default path is to supplement Purview with a governance layer and replace the basic Purview functionality when scale or complexity makes centralized control indispensable.  

This keeps preservation where it is while adding the engagement, automation, and analytics Purview lacks. 

Quick answer 

• Supplement Purview with CaseFusion when you want enterprise-grade workflows while keeping Microsoft 365 as the preservation system of record. 
• Replace Purview when your portfolio is large or global and you need a single, purpose-built platform to run the entire hold lifecycle end-to-end. 

 How to decide in 60 seconds 

• Choose Supplement if you run about 5+ holds per year, manage concurrent matters, or owe board-level reporting. You also want questionnaires, comprehension checks, multimatter safeguards, and automation, without moving preservation out of Microsoft 365. 
• Choose Replace if you run 20+ holds per year, face complex cross-matter dependencies, require multilingual/regulator-specific content, and consider executive dashboards/analytics table stakes. You need one system to issue, track, and release holds across Microsoft and non-Microsoft sources. 

Start by supplementing the current Purview processes with CaseFusion, measure time saved and reduction in release mistakes, and reassess after two quarters.  

If volume or risk climbs, a phased transition to a single, purpose-built platform becomes the safer long-term move 

What is CaseFusion Legal Hold? 

CaseFusion Legal Hold offers enterprise-grade legal hold automation at an unprecedented $1 per active employee per year (with a $3,000 minimum). Unlike Purview’s basic capabilities or costly enterprise alternatives, CaseFusion Legal Hold was purpose-built for legal hold notifications and governance. 

CaseFusion Core Capabilities 

• Unlimited legal holds with no hidden fees 
• Advanced custodian engagement and questionnaires 
• Multi-matter and cross-custodian management 
• Comprehensive compliance reporting and analytics 
• Automated reminders and sophisticated escalation workflows 
• Template libraries with multi-language support 
• Complete audit trails and court-tested processes 
• Seamless Active Directory and Microsoft 365 integration 

Why Organizations Choose CaseFusion Legal Hold

• Unbeatable value: enterprise features at $1/employee pricing 
• Rapid implementation: 2–4 weeks to full production 
• Proven results: ~75% reduction in administrative time 
• Superior defensibility: built-in compliance and audit-ready documentation 
• Exceptional support: dedicated legal hold experts, not generic IT support 
• Customer satisfaction: 98% customer retention rate 

Flexible Deployment 

• Supplement Purview for notifications while maintaining Microsoft preservation 
• Replace Purview entirely for comprehensive legal hold management 
• Integrate with existing enterprise systems and workflows 

Ready To Move Beyond Purview’s Limitations?

The investment decision is clear. 

With Purview’s hidden costs ranging from $60,000–$125,000 annually and CaseFusion Legal Hold starting at just $3,000, the financial case is overwhelming. Add superior features, reduced risk, improved defensibility, and major efficiency gains, and the decision becomes obvious. The right legal hold solution provides more than software: It provides peace of mind that your process is defensible, your team is efficient, and your organization is protected. CaseFusion Legal Hold delivers all of this at a price point that makes the decision straightforward. 

Take the next step and book a personalized demo at www.cloudficient.com/legalhold

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Microsoft Purview enough for Small Organizations?

Yes, Microsoft Purview is enough for small organizations, if you only run a few straightforward holds a year, have small custodian groups, and don't need cross-matter safeguards. As volume and complexity grow, gaps in automation, analytics, and multi-matter control become costly.don't

Do you have to move Data out of Microsoft 365 to use CaseFusion?

No, CaseFusion issues in-place legal holds and integrates with Microsoft 365 (and other platforms), so you can keep M365 as the preservation layer while CaseFusion handles custodian engagement, automation, and reporting.

How fast can we implement CaseFusion?

CaseFusion can be implemented very fast. A Baseline installation of CaseFusion Identify & Preserve targeting Active Directory can be up and running within 48-72 hours, depending on the number of custodians.

What about non-Microsoft data sources(e.g., Slack, Box, HR)?

CaseFusion can create scalable collections from multiple sources. Including but not limited to M365, Teams, Slack, Box, and many others.