Here’s a great new resource that people in eDiscovery should check out. EDRM has released the final release of its new EDRM eDiscovery Processing Guidelines!

With the eDiscovery Processing Guidelines announced yesterday, the Processing Guidelines Project has been led by eDiscovery experts, EDRM Global Advisory Council Leaders and co-Trustees, John Tredennick, CEO of Merlin Search Technologies, Inc. and Craig Ball, of Craig D. Ball, PC. Tammy Dahl, ACP, CEDS of Mesch Clark Rothschild was the Assistant Editor and the Drafting Team included Christopher Cella, Aon; Tracyann Eggen, CommonSpirit Health; William Hamilton, University of Florida Levin School of Law; Oran Sears, Relativity; Sarai Shubert, IPRO and Jeffrey Wolff, ZyLAB.

These guidelines were adapted from Craig Ball’s seminal work, Processing in E-Discovery, A Primer, which he published in 2019 (and I covered back then on my old blog). The diagram above is taken from Craig’s 2019 primer and provides an excellent illustration of how complex the Processing stage is for eDiscovery.

The 40 page PDF guide (available for download here) is well organized and easy to read, starting with the Scope and Principles of the project, followed by the five key phases of the processing stage:

• 1.0 ESI Ingestion and File Extraction
• 2.0 Initial Filtering
• 3.0 Text, Metadata and Image Extraction
• 4.0 Output
• 5.0 Reporting

The Guidelines conclude with a terrific Glossary of eDiscovery processing terms.

Those of you who know the EDRM model by heart (that’s all of you, right?) know that processing bridges the gap between preservation/collection and review/analysis. It’s literally the point in which preserved and collected evidence is prepared for the “right side” phases of the EDRM life cycle (i.e., Analysis, Review, Production and Presentation).

For years from clients, I’ve heard the question “the files are already electronic, how hard can they be to load?” The new eDiscovery Processing Guidelines from EDRM does a great job in answering that question! 🙂

So, what do you think?  Are you going to check out the new eDiscovery Processing Guidelines from EDRM? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

BTW, I know that the Guidelines use the “E-Discovery” spelling, but “eDiscovery” is better for SEO purposes. 😉

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