Microsoft Purview Keeps Blocking Your Sends. Here's Why, and What Actually Works.
You enabled it. It blocked things that shouldn't have been blocked. Someone created an exception. Now it's essentially a logging tool nobody reads. This is not a unique experience. Here is why it happened, and what to do instead.
Why Purview fails at most law firms, and why that's not your fault
Microsoft Purview is a genuinely capable tool. It was designed for large enterprise organizations with dedicated security teams who configure it, tune it, and manage it full time. That is the environment it was built for.
A law firm without a dedicated IT administrator is not that environment. When Purview is deployed without the resources to maintain it, one of two things happens: it is set too restrictively and generates so many false positives that staff routes around it, or it is loosened to stop the complaints and ends up doing nothing.
This is not a failure of your office manager or your IT vendor. It is a product that requires inputs your firm doesn't have.
Purview was built for IT departments at enterprises. Dataguard was built for firms without one.
Side by side
Five dimensions that matter for a firm without a full-time IT department.
| Dimension | Microsoft Purview | Dataguard |
|---|---|---|
| Setup time | Weeks + IT configuration | 5 minutes |
| Who manages it daily | Requires trained IT admin | Zero, fully automatic |
| When something is flagged | Send is blocked; manual review queue | Sensitive content removed; share proceeds clean |
| Employee experience | Blocked send, no clear explanation | Document shared; clear summary of what was removed |
| Microsoft license required | M365 E5 (~$57/user/month) | Works with any M365 plan |
| Built for | Enterprise IT departments | Firms without an IT team |
| Legal-specific policies | Generic DLP policies (manual configuration) | Pre-built for HIPAA, ABA 1.6, CCPA, state bar requirements |
The architectural difference that matters
Purview is a policy management platform. You configure the policies, manage the exceptions, review the flagged items, and adjust the rules over time. That requires someone doing it.
Dataguard is a document protection layer. The policies are built in and pre-configured for legal. Every outbound document is reviewed and cleaned automatically. Nothing requires a human decision between the share and the protection.
Three steps. Zero behavior change from your team.
DataGuard runs automatically in the background. Your paralegals don't learn a new tool. They just stop accidentally sending things they shouldn't.
DataGuard lives inside the tools you already use
No new tools for your team to learn. DataGuard installs directly into Outlook, Gmail, OneDrive, Google Drive, SharePoint, and Clio, the tools your team already uses every day.
Every outbound document is scanned automatically
When a document is about to leave the firm (via email, a shared link, or a file attachment) DataGuard reads it against your privacy policies before it reaches anyone outside.
Sensitive content is removed. The share goes through clean.
SSNs, diagnosis codes, government IDs, and other restricted information are stripped from the document. The recipient gets a clean file. Your team gets a summary of what was removed. The audit log records the event.
See What Dataguard Would Have Caught That Purview Blocked or Missed
20 minutes. We'll walk through your specific Purview issues and show you how Dataguard handles the same scenarios automatically.