The legal profession is known for being cautious or hesitant to adopt new technologies. However, when it comes to AI, it seems like legal professionals are ready to be on the leading edge of AI implementation. A Thomson Reuters survey of legal professionals found that 82% agree that AI can be useful in legal work and 51% agree that AI should be applied to legal work.¹

With the growing use of AI in litigation and number of data storage locations, the process of ediscovery gets increasingly more complex and must be more agile, comprehensive, and integrated. The tools legal professionals need in today’s digital environment necessitate using advanced tools such as AI to locate the relevant data quickly and securing data in a way that complies with myriad regulations and major challenges.

To help you secure data and address your needs efficiently in the age of AI, we’re making it easier to safeguard and manage compliance of data using generative AI tools. Recent advanced capabilities of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery are aimed at giving you the advantage. If you’re attending the Legalweek conference in New York City from January 29 to February 1, 2024, we’d love to connect. Read on for an overview of what you can expect our experts to discuss, and keep scrolling for sessions and other ways to connect with us at Legalweek.

Microsoft at Legalweek: How generative AI helps address eDiscovery challenges

Microsoft is continuously innovating to ensure our solutions help organizations achieve their objectives, and Microsoft Purview is no exception. We are committed to enhancing Microsoft Purview for an improved overall user experience. Offering the advantages of AI is a further step toward this commitment. In November 2023, we announced new features and capabilities of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery harnessing Microsoft Security Copilot.

The latest release of eDiscovery enables the search, discovery, preservation, review, and export of Copilot interactions in Microsoft 365 across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Microsoft Teams, and other applications. This boosts the efficiency of eDiscovery—an essential tool that allows you to search for evidence and gain an understanding of what occurred for informed decision-making.

Here are two advantages of the combination of eDiscovery and generative AI for legal professionals:

Efficient handling of massive datasets

The volume of data produced in litigation necessitates a solution that can keep up. Microsoft Purview eDiscovery features intelligent, machine learning capabilities to make it easier to locate the most relevant items for review, and help you get started quickly.

Two new Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Purview help you better manage huge datasets by helping you to:

• Accelerate and refine your search: A successful investigation relies on an accurate search but query-building can be challenging. Creating a query in Keyword Query Language (KQL) can be time-consuming. Soon available in preview, a new capability lets you provide a prompt in natural language and Copilot will translate the query into KQL.
• Accelerate and navigate your investigation: Based on conversations with our customers, eDiscovery admins and managers spent 60% of their time reviewing evidence collected in review sets. Soon in preview, a new capability lets you generate document summaries and walks you through your investigation with guided prompts.   

Compliance with constantly changing regulations

Integrating AI technology like Microsoft Security Copilot into your existing eDiscovery workflows gives you more careful accounting of your sensitive or confidential information or evidence of intellectual property. This makes it much easier to satisfy the numerous regulations that dictate how data can be collected, stored, used, and managed.

Microsoft Purview makes it easy to comply by providing tools for data risk identification and regulatory requirement management. In addition, this solution features expanded risk detections gathering signals from infrastructure clouds and third-party apps, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Box, Dropbox, and GitHub.

Compliance is also easier because the solution allows you to:

• Ensure more consistent protections regardless of data type.
• Discover, label, and classify data across sources, including Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Azure, and AWS.
• Restrict access to sensitive data (determined by labels or roles).
• Detect business violations.
• Gain visibility into generative AI app usage.

Mark your calendar for these Legalweek sessions

There’s more we’ll cover at Legalweek 2024. During three sessions, Microsoft experts and legal experts will provide a glimpse at the current cybersecurity challenges in the legal sector as well as share strategies to tackle these challenges with modern cybersecurity and technology solutions.

The Microsoft sessions at Legalweek are:

Connect with Microsoft at Legalweek

If you seek strategies for safeguarding and managing the compliance of your data, check out one or more of our sessions at Legalweek. Throughout the conference, you can also interact with our Microsoft experts directly in a few ways:

• Stop by Booth #3105 in Americas Hall 2 to learn how Microsoft solutions can address your challenges.
• Request to attend the Executive Breakfast on Tuesday, January 30, 2024.
• Request dedicated time with our eDiscovery experts, who will be available between 9:00 AM ET and 5:00 PM ET, Monday, January 29, 2024, through Thursday, February 1, 2024. We’d love to connect. Hope to see you there!

Learn more

Learn more about Microsoft Purview eDiscovery.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹New report on ChatGPT & generative AI in law firms shows opportunities abound, even as concerns persist, Thomson Reuters. April 17, 2023.