I was doing some testing over the weekend (Yeah, I know, not the most exciting holiday weekend, but keeping up with this stuff takes time) with meeting notes and external users, because Microsoft has been sharing meeting notes with external users, but I had yet to see them appear in the meeting as an external user.
This is changing, and I can see the notes in the meeting in one tenant. More on that in an upcoming blog post.
It got me thinking, though, about whether, during the eDiscovery process, you could tell that an external user had added to the notes during a meeting.
I couldn’t find any evidence.
The next obvious question, of course, was whether you could tell who took notes during any meeting.
After digging and experimenting with collecting all of the versions of the Loop file, etc., the answer was still no. Only one author was listed, one custodian, one file path to the meeting organizer's OneDrive, and no indication that someone else may have taken the notes.
The only time I could tell another user had added anything to the notes was if they assigned a task; then the notification would tell me who assigned it. The notes file by itself did not.
I’m not sure whether this matters in the eDiscovery world; we often have only one author listed on Word documents edited by many people, for example. It would require a much deeper dive to try and piece together who edited it over time. Meeting notes, however, are an interesting entry point to the larger discussion about collaborative environments because they live in the meeting, where agents, organizers, and attendees may add bullet points or create tasks. In many ways, they are the perfect example of a document where no one knows who wrote it.
Which begs the question of whether you should base any kind of litigation strategy on the contents of something that a group of people quickly wrote down during a meeting, but that’s something to discuss with your legal team. 😏
Let me show you the details:
