When someone leaves your firm, Nexl gives you two client-side actions on their record: archive, which is reversible and removes them from lists and search, and purge, which is permanent and anonymises them. Two further options are available on request from Nexl.
This article sets out precisely what each action achieves so you can match it to what your firm actually needs, whether that is tidying up employee lists or responding to an erasure request.
Read first
A purged employee does not stay purged on its own. Three separate mechanisms can recreate the record, and the nightly directory sync is only one of them. Work through the correct order of operations before you purge.
Choosing the right action
Action | Who can do it | Reversible | What it achieves |
Archive | Any user with the archive permission | Yes | Removes them from contact and employee lists and from search. All history stays intact. |
Purge | Admins only | No | Anonymises the person and deletes a defined set of associated records. |
Hide employee | On request from Nexl | Yes | Removes them from employee pickers and dropdowns, which archiving alone does not do. |
Hide from Who Knows | On request from Nexl | Yes | Removes them from Who Knows in both directions, destroying nothing. |
The correct order of operations
Follow these four steps in sequence. Skipping either of the first two means the record regenerates, and the leaver reappears alongside the [Purged] shell.
Disable or delete their directory account. Done by your firm in Microsoft Entra or Google. While the account is enabled, the nightly sync keeps pushing their details back into Nexl.
Remove their Nexl user account. While the login exists, routine activity on that user record recreates their contact email address and re-flags them as an employee.
Archive the employee from the All Employees tab.
Purge from Admin Cog → Data Cleaner → Archived → Contacts.
1. Archiving an employee
Archiving is a soft delete. It records the date, who archived the person, and why. Nothing is deleted, and the action can be reversed.
Employees are archived from the All Employees tab using the bulk action bar, provided that tab is available in your tenant.
Archiving from the All Employees tab.
What archiving does
Removes them from the All Contacts and All Employees grids
Removes them from contact quick search and global search
Makes them available to an Admin under Admin Cog → Data Cleaner → Archived → Contacts, where they can be restored or purged
What archiving does not do
Two behaviours are commonly assumed to work this way and do not.
Archiving does not remove an employee from pickers and dropdowns
An archived former employee still appears when a user assigns a task, picks a relationship owner, or selects a lawyer. Removing them from those lists requires the hide employee option, which Nexl applies on request. |
Archiving does not remove an employee from Who Knows
An archived employee continues to surface in Who Knows results. To take them out of Who Knows without deleting anything, ask Nexl to hide them from Who Knows. |
Archiving also leaves untouched all activity and interaction history, key activities, notes, tasks, list memberships, and relationship ownership.
Watch this setting
If Automatically unarchive on next interaction is ticked when you archive, the person is restored the next time an email or meeting involving them is synced. Leave it unticked for a leaver. |
2. Purging an employee
Purging is permanent and cannot be undone. An Admin performs it from Admin Cog → Data Cleaner → Archived → Contacts, and a written reason is required. The reason is stored on the record along with who performed the purge.
The employee must be archived first, because the purge action is only available from the Archived list.
Purging an archived contact from Data Cleaner.
Deleted outright
All of the person's email addresses
Their address and location record
All custom field values on their record
All notes attached to them as a contact
All tasks where they are the subject of the task
Marketing list memberships and their marketing consent record
Their own audit trail, replaced by a single entry recording the purge, the reason, and who did it
Anonymised
The record survives as an empty shell named [Purged].
Field | After purge |
First name | Set to |
Last name, job title, phone numbers | Cleared |
LinkedIn URL, Twitter / X URL | Cleared |
Tags, education history | Cleared |
Office and department / practice group | Retained |
Deleted within a couple of days
Who Knows entries in both directions, covering both who knows this person and who this person knows. These are flagged as deleted immediately, then permanently removed by a daily clean-up job roughly two days later. This is the only part of the purge that is not immediate.
Removed from the product, retained in the database
Their employee-to-company interaction statistics disappear from the product, but the underlying rows remain.
3. What a purge does not remove
Important for erasure requests
A purge removes the person from Nexl's people-and-relationships layer. It does not scrub them from the underlying communications record. A purge is not complete erasure, and it should not be described as such when responding to a request.
Data | What remains |
Emails and meetings | Every raw interaction record is retained, including the person's email address and display name on each message and meeting they appeared on. Activity feed entries survive, now attributed to |
Key activities | Retained in full, including titles, comments, and created-by attribution. |
Notes they authored | Retained. Each note also stores a plain-text copy of the author's name, which the purge does not clear. |
Audit history elsewhere | Every audit entry across the tenant where they were the person making the change retains their username. |
Their employee record | Retained, including office and practice group. They remain an employee object in the system. |
Relationship ownership | Their My Contacts relationships over client contacts are retained, so they remain the recorded relationship owner. |
Ordinary contact lists | Retained. Only marketing lists are cleaned, so they linger as a |
Opportunities and portfolios | Retained where they are the referral source or an assigned lawyer, plus portfolio memberships, objectives, and project team memberships. |
Profile photo and enrichment | Retained, including the stored third-party profile payload. |
Their Nexl login | Retained. The user record keeps their email address. |
Exports and campaign history | Any CSV export already generated is retained with no automatic expiry, as is email marketing send history. |
4. Why a purged employee can come back
Three independent mechanisms can recreate the record. Because the purge deletes the person's email address, each one creates a brand new contact and employee record rather than restoring the old one, so the leaver reappears alongside the [Purged] shell.
a. The directory sync (Microsoft Entra or Google)
The sync only pushes an employee's details back into Nexl if their directory account is still enabled. Disable or delete the account and the nightly sync stops touching them.
If the account remains enabled, which is common when a mailbox is kept alive for handover, the sync recreates the email address, contact, and employee record, and re-populates first name, last name, job title, phone, office, and department straight from the directory.
b. Email and calendar sync
This is the path most often missed. Nexl automatically creates a contact for any participant email address it has not seen before. Since the purge deleted the address, the next email or meeting involving it creates a fresh record, and because the address is on your firm's own domain, a fresh employee record too. A historical mailbox backfill has the same effect.
Two tenant settings reduce the impact. Both are configured by Nexl on request:
Pause contacts on creation — newly auto-created contacts are archived immediately
Hide auto-created employees — newly auto-created employees are flagged hidden, keeping them out of pickers
c. Their own Nexl user account
If the leaver's Nexl login still exists, routine activity on that user record recreates the contact email address and re-flags the contact as an employee.
5. Anonymising instead of deleting
A common request is to anonymise a former employee rather than delete them, keeping only something like "former employee" and their practice group.
The purge already does most of this. It does not delete the row. It renames the person to [Purged] and retains the employee record, office, and practice group. Two points are worth confirming before you rely on it:
The label reads
[Purged], not "Former employee". Cosmetic, but it matters on a screen a partner or client might see.The purge strips the Who Knows and relationship data and keeps the practice group label. Removing the individual while keeping firm-level relationship insight is not currently supported.
6. Lighter-touch alternatives
If the real need is to get former employees out of search and out of Who Knows rather than to erase them, these options are reversible and destroy nothing.
Option | Effect | How |
Archive | Removes the person from lists and search. | Done by your firm, from the All Employees tab. |
Hide employee | Removes the person from employee pickers and dropdowns. | Applied by Nexl on request, in bulk. |
Hide from Who Knows | Removes the person from Who Knows entirely, in both directions. Nothing is deleted. | Applied by Nexl on request. |
Before you purge
A purge cannot be undone. There is no restore path, and no confirmation step beyond the reason field.
A purge is not full erasure. The interaction record retains the person's email address and display name.
Confirm the directory account state first. Whether the leaver's Entra or Google account is still enabled changes the outcome entirely.
Check your tenant's auto-create settings. They determine what happens if the record regenerates.