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.
Current Microsoft Purview legal hold capabilities include:
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:
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.
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.
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:
If you’re assembling this manually each quarter, the process itself becomes a control weakness.
Enterprises often have custodians on multiple concurrent holds. Because Purview treats cases independently, you face risks such as:
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.
Many legal teams need nuanced, jurisdiction-aware content, often in multiple languages with clear version control. Purview’s templates are serviceable but limited for:
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.
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.
This is a true cost comparison for a typical mid-enterprise with 15–25 holds/year.
|
Cost Element |
Purview (Annual) |
CaseFusion (Annual) |
Difference |
|
Software cost |
$0 (included with E5) |
$3,000–$10,000 |
+ Software cost |
|
Workaround time |
$30,000–$60,000 |
$0 |
– $30,000–$60,000 |
|
Tracking supplements |
$5,000–$15,000 |
$0 |
– $5,000–$15,000 |
|
Audit preparation |
$10,000–$20,000 |
$2,000–$5,000 |
– $8,000–$15,000 |
|
Opportunity cost |
$15,000–$30,000 |
Minimal |
– $15,000–$30,000 |
|
Net annual cost |
$60,000–$125,000 |
$5,000–$15,000 |
SAVE $45,000–$110,000 |
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.
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.
|
Workflow Requirement |
Status Quo in Purview |
With a Purpose Built Platform |
|
Employee departure handling |
Hours per departure |
Automatic via AD/HR sync |
|
Reminders & cadence changes |
Per custodian edits |
Rules-based automation |
|
Multi-matter coordination |
Manual tracking |
Conflict detection & safeguards |
|
Escalation paths |
Limited presets |
Role-aware, fully customizable |
|
Compliance threshold alerts |
Manual review |
Real-time monitoring |
|
Reporting & dashboards |
Basic views |
Executivegrade analytics |
|
Questionnaires & comprehension |
Not available |
Integrated, auditable workflows |
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.
|
Capability |
Microsoft Purview |
CaseFusion Legal Hold |
|
Basic notifications |
✓ |
✓ |
|
Acknowledgment tracking |
Basic |
Advanced + analytics |
|
Custodian questionnaires |
✗ |
✓ |
|
Automated reminders/escalations |
Limited |
Fully customizable |
|
Multi-matter management |
Weak |
Strong with safeguards |
|
Cross-custodian views |
✗ |
✓ |
|
Compliance reporting |
Basic |
Comprehensive |
|
Template variants & languages |
Limited |
Extensive & multilingual |
|
AD/HR integrations |
Native AD only |
AD + HR systems |
|
Executive dashboards |
✗ |
✓ |
|
Risk/engagement scoring |
✗ |
✓ |
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
How to decide in 60 seconds
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
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.
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
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.