Craig Ball published a terrific blog post last week about the EDRM model. I agree with Craig that the EDRM isn’t broken. It doesn’t matter. Here’s why.

As discussed in his post titled The EDRM Isn’t Broken; It’s Misunderstood. (available here), Craig says he “recently received a marketing email that contained this gem: Organizations are ‘asking if EDRM is structurally prepared for investigations.’

Short answer: Yes. Obviously. Because the EDRM was never a structure to begin with.

That’s not a knock. That’s the point.”

Why? As Craig continues:

“The Electronic Discovery Reference Model is–wait for it*–a reference model—not a workflow, not a platform architecture, not an operational blueprint. A reference model is a conceptual framework that identifies the principal stages and relationships in a process. It doesn’t tell you how to do something; it maps what needs doing. Think of it as a compass, not a GPS turn-by-turn. It orients you. It doesn’t drive for you, and it ain’t broke.”

I agree with Craig Ball. The EDRM model is a reference model, not a workflow or any of those other things.

Who else agrees with that? George Socha, one of the founding members of EDRM. I remember conducting a thought leader interview with him years ago asking about whether the Analysis phase and whether it should be moved or expanded because Analysis appears throughout the discovery process and he said pretty much the same thing – it’s a reference model, not a workflow. That made sense to me.

I suspect Tom Gelbmann (the other founding member of the EDRM) feels the same way.

And they’re right. It literally has “Reference Model” in the name. Duh. 😉

So, when at least one (if not both) founders of EDRM and one of the leading eDiscovery thought leaders say we need to think of it as a reference model, why are so many people trying to change it?

Simple: because it looks like a workflow. There are arrows taking you from the early stages of discovery – Identification, Preservation and Collection of ESI to the last stages of eDiscovery – Production and Presentation of ESI evidence. It’s natural to think of it as a workflow. That’s why the entire industry talks about phases being conducted on the “left side” of the EDRM vs. the “right side” – these are terms people associate with a workflow. Entire software providers position themselves as “left side” or “right side” solution providers (others say they cover the entire EDRM lifecycle – “end-to-end” – but most don’t do it well). The industry has literally been built on treating it as a workflow.

I also think looking at it as a workflow has helped people understand eDiscovery better. The EDRM model is the single best teaching tool we have which illustrates what eDiscovery is all about. They understand the phases that go into eDiscovery and the flow representation of it helps them understand the typical order of the phases.

I agree with Craig Ball that the EDRM isn’t broken. And it is misunderstood. But it doesn’t matter as long as most people in our industry see it as a workflow. The only way people will see it as a reference model is if it doesn’t look so much like a workflow with arrows pointing from phase to phase. It looks too much like a workflow now for most people to see it as anything else.

At some point, you have to go with the flow (see what I did there? 🤣). I have, and many of the people working on the EDRM 2.0 project have too.

So, what do you think? Do you agree with Craig Ball that the EDRM isn’t broken? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

P.S.: I couldn’t possibly do any better than Craig’s own EDRM classic model rendition with hearts around it, so his excellent post is the source of the graphic above.

*Hey, that’s my line! 😉

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