When organisations talk about the risks of legacy email archives, the conversation often focuses on cost or technical debt. But for Legal and Information Governance teams, the most immediate and tangible risk is much simpler: time.
In modern organisations, email remains one of the most important sources of evidence for litigation, regulatory inquiries, FOI requests and Subject Access Requests (SARs). When that email data is fragmented across multiple systems — live mail in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, historic data in a legacy archive — eDiscovery becomes slower, more complex and more error-prone.
The impact is not theoretical. Slow or incomplete searches increase the risk of missed disclosures, inconsistent responses and last-minute scrambles to meet statutory deadlines. In FOI and SAR scenarios, delays can quickly escalate into formal complaints, enforcement action or reputational damage. In litigation, they can weaken an organisation’s legal position or increase reliance on external support at significant cost.
Legacy archives are often at the heart of the problem. Many were designed for long-term storage, not rapid investigation. Search interfaces are outdated, indexing is slow, and query logic differs from modern eDiscovery tools. Even when results are returned, teams may struggle to reconcile findings from multiple systems into a single, defensible response.
There is also a governance challenge. Retention policies applied in legacy archives frequently reflect decisions made years ago, sometimes by teams that no longer exist. Legal and IG teams are left working around inconsistent retention rules, duplicated content and unclear deletion histories — all of which complicate disclosure and audit trails.
By contrast, modern cloud platforms prioritise investigation and defensibility. Migrating legacy email archives into Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace enables Legal and IG teams to use a single eDiscovery framework across all email data, historic and current. Searches are faster, retention is consistent, and audit logs are unified.
Just as importantly, teams gain confidence. Confidence that all relevant data has been searched. Confidence that responses are complete and defensible. And confidence that deadlines can be met without extraordinary effort.
In an environment of increasing regulatory scrutiny and legal complexity, slow eDiscovery is no longer just an inconvenience. For many organisations, it has become a genuine legal risk — one that can be addressed by bringing legacy email archives back into the modern, cloud-based governance model.
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