The CLOC Core 12 infographic is one of the best infographics in legal. But eDiscovery isn’t in the CLOC Core 12. Here’s why.

If you’re not familiar with it, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) Core 12 infographic (available here) provides guidance in 12 functional areas – known as the “Core 12” – and applies to many environments and requirements towards operational excellence for legal operations. It’s a terrific maturity model that promotes organizational and functional maturity for legal operations. The Core 12 are:

• Business Intelligence
• Financial Management
• Firm & Vendor Management
• Information Governance
• Knowledge Management
• Organization Optimization & Health
• Practice Operations
• Project/Program Management
• Service Delivery Models
• Strategic Planning
• Technology
• Training & Development

As you can see, eDiscovery isn’t in the CLOC Core 12. I was discussing this with someone recently and they asked why it isn’t in there. Here’s why I think it isn’t there.

If you look at each of the CLOC Core 12 functional areas, they have (at least) one thing in common – they are all ongoing, perpetual programs. These are functional areas that need to be addressed on a continual basis by legal operations within most organizations, regardless of what’s going on with the company at the time. Legal ops teams will always have a need for strategic planning and financial management and technology (as well as the other nine functional areas) to support ongoing needs.

eDiscovery isn’t perpetual. Most eDiscovery projects have a start and an end, and their start is initiated by some sort of trigger event – e.g., a litigation cases is filed, an investigation is launched, a cyber incident occurs, etc. eDiscovery isn’t a perpetual process, and that’s reflected in the EDRM model in the phases Identification through Presentation.

What about Information Governance, you say? It’s part of the EDRM model too. True, but it’s different. Since Information Management became Information Governance in earlier iterations of the EDRM model, it has been represented as a circle instead of a box like the other phases. Why? Because it’s perpetual, with no start or end. Today, that circle is represented by the Information Governance Reference Model (IGRM).

How does eDiscovery relate to the CLOC Core 12? eDiscovery involves many (if not all) of the functional areas within it. In addition to Information Governance, eDiscovery involves everything from Strategic Planning to Project/Program Management to Firm & Vendor Management to Service Delivery Models to Training & Development. And, of course, it includes Technology! Operational Maturity in the CLOC Core 12 functional areas is key to streamlining eDiscovery. And contract management. And every other discipline that involves legal operations.

BTW, I said streamlining eDiscovery, not litigation. Sure, it does that too. But litigation is a use case for eDiscovery; it is not synonymous with eDiscovery (though many people still erroneously – IMHO – use the terms interchangeably). Investigations and data privacy requests and cyber incident response and second requests are all use cases for eDiscovery. As we have learned through the State of the Industry report, many people are applying eDiscovery workflows and technology to a variety of use cases. I repeat: eDiscovery is not synonymous with litigation! (Soap box put away now). 😉

So, eDiscovery isn’t in the CLOC Core 12 and I agree with that.

Speaking of CLOC, we’re two months away from this year’s CLOC Global Institute conference, which runs May 6th through 9th, at the ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, which has become well attended by eDiscovery professionals – even though eDiscovery isn’t in the CLOC Core 12! Click the link to find out more about this year’s conference!

So, what do you think? Do you agree that eDiscovery shouldn’t be in the CLOC Core 12? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.