In our last issue, I discussed how meeting notes in Teams are a Loop document and how hard it is to identify who took notes during the meeting because the organizer created the agenda when they sent the invite.
That’s because there’s no metadata in the eDiscovery review set about who modified the notes, just the original author.
Today, I want to talk more about collecting meeting notes because recurring meetings create a number of issues.
One of the known issues with recurring meetings, of course, is that there is only one meeting item that can be collected from Exchange, from the first meeting in the series. If you’re trying to recreate someone’s calendar for a day by collecting meetings where the start and end date of the meeting was that day, recurring meetings that started before that day won't show up. Because, in a sense, they aren’t there. The item you see on the calendar is a figment of your imagination, the ghost of the original meeting. Not a meeting unto itself.
That’s often frustrating enough, but Teams meeting notes throw another wrench in the works.
Let me give you an example. I send out a standing meeting with another user in my environment for a weekly meeting for the month. I set it to start the day after Labor Day, Sept. 8. Subsequent events are Sept. 15, 22, and 29.
I create an agenda before sending out the invite in the Teams calendar.
One .loop file gets created. I like to call it the agenda template for the series. It’s named simply Standing_Meeting.loop.
It is in my OneDrive, as the meeting organizer, inside a “Meetings” folder.
I invite Adele.
On Sept. 8, Adele is the first one to join the meeting. The notes for that event in the series are created based on the template when the meeting starts.
This file is named Standing_Meeting_9-8-2026.loop.
It lives in Adele’s OneDrive. She created it when she started the meeting. She is the author and the custodian.
On Sept. 15, I started the meeting.
The Standing_Meeting_9-15-2026.loop file gets created in my OneDrive.
On Sept. 22, Adele was the first to join the meeting.
The Standing_Meeting_9-22-2026 file gets created in Adele’s OneDrive
During the meeting on the 22nd, we agreed to revisit a topic at our next meeting. I open the Teams calendar item for Sept. 29 and add it to the agenda.
The Standing_Meeting_09-29-2026 file gets created as soon as I open the agenda for the upcoming meeting. It’s in my OneDrive. It doesn’t matter who arrives first to the meeting on Sept. 29; the notes already exist.
This might not seem like a very big deal in my test example, because there are only two possible locations. How many of your recurring meetings only have two attendees, though?
Imagine a team meeting with 12 people every week, where the organizer has set it up for Copilot Facilitator to take notes automatically.
For eDiscovery purposes, I need to collect notes from twelve different OneDrive accounts to locate all possible notes from this recurring meeting. Any one of those twelve could have been the first one to join a particular event in the series and be the custodian of the notes.
I think we might be better off just hoping we never have litigation where meeting notes become a relevant issue. I can’t imagine that would never happen, though.