Planning for E-discovery: Requirements For a Successful Project

09
Nov
2010

Frank Coggrave

Since its creation in 2005, the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) has provided a uniform, eight-stage process to help legal and IT successfully execute e-discovery projects. And while the EDRM has become essential to e-discovery, it doesn’t specify the proper project planning that is increasingly the key to successful outcomes.

The EDRM does, however, make planning easier because it provides a set of expectations at each stage so that legal and IT can start the process with the end in mind.  E-discovery teams should take proper planning very seriously because it reduces the likelihood of executing a collection prematurely, with the potential for missing key elements and search terms.

By jumping the gun on a project, an e-discovery team can waste time and resources or, worse yet, cause evidence spoliation that can lead to sanctions or costly settlements.

Therefore, it is important to be sure that all of the requirements of the project and the scope of the litigation matter are well understood by all of the parties.  This helps to set the search parameters, which helps return results faster and minimizes the human resources that go into analyzing the data.  At the same time, having this early understanding of the search criteria will also help the team roll out deliverables on time and prevent scope creep that can paralyze projects.

Once the facts of the case are understood, project planners can skip ahead in the EDRM to the presentation stage – that is, when all of the evidence is required to be available for presentation to audiences in its native or near native form – and develop their plan by looking at the final data requirements. This will lead to consideration of several questions.  What are the review/production or presentation requirements? Will outside vendors be needed for collection or additional processing?  What are the de-duplication requirements and what resources do they need?  Which way should the processed ESI be structured for delivery and what will the naming conventions be for deliverables?  Will rolling deliverables be needed and on what schedule?  And will they be delivered via HDD or FTP? Finally, ask whether a privileged search will be required in addition to primary searching.

The number of custodians and the amount of data combined determine the size and scope of a project, so understanding these universes up front is essential. Query employees, contractors and other relevant parties to determine how many are custodians. Next, find out where they are located and how much bandwidth is available between locations for data transfers. Finally, determine the priority of each custodian and whether their data requires any special handling.

The best way to determine the amount of evidence is to sample the data to test the responsiveness of different search terms.  Some terms may return thousands of documents that are not relevant to the matter at hand.  In big organizations with terabytes of data, it’s impossible to determine the evidence scope without sampling. Once the sampling is done, the search terms can be reworded to ensure they return only the most appropriate evidence.

Communication is also important in an e-discovery project and the person in charge of the matter must be in contact with all of the stakeholders to set appropriate expectations and to provide the reporting at each phase that will help with decision making.

Once you have successfully completed the steps of planning, organization and communication, you’re ready to jump into the EDRM and actually begin your search. While today’s advanced technology solutions play an important role in the e-Discovery process, combining this technology with planning, organization and communication will ensure a successful process with minimal errors and increased overall efficiency.