After Craig Ball raised concerns about it, the Reconstruction-Grade eDiscovery standard has been updated. Here are the details.

In this post by Peter Kozak (The Dog, the Tail, and the Staircase, available here), he provides a response – “[n]ot a rebuttal” – to Craig’s post titled A Dog and Its Tail: Don’t Let Version Uncertainty Cloud Linked Attachment Production (available here and covered by us here). While Craig called the standard “ambitious and thoughtful” and said he wanted to engage constructively because “I think it gets several things right”, he also “raised a concern we hadn’t fully seen ourselves”, says Peter.

That concern was related to the versioning question — which version of a linked document is the right one — which Craig felt is being elevated in ways that could become the next excuse for non-production. In other words, a standard with three conformance levels could be turned into a shield by a producing party arguing that because it can’t achieve even baseline conformance, it shouldn’t be required to attempt collection of linked attachments at all. Craig called that the “tail wagging the dog”.

As Peter noted:

Craig put it simply: “Producing the ‘wrong’ version of a responsive document is a problem. Producing no version of a responsive document is a bigger problem.”

We couldn’t agree more. And when we looked at the standard through that lens, we saw the gap he was pointing at.

The standard’s lowest conformance level — RG-Core — required deterministic as-sent version resolution. But, it left implicit something that needed to be explicit: the gap between “non-conformant” and “RG-Core” was wide enough that a producing party could read it as binary — either you reconstruct, or you’re excused.

So, the Reconstruction-Grade eDiscovery standard has been updated. Version 0.54 of the standard introduces RG-Aware — a pre-conformance adoption tier beneath RG-Core, RG-Plus, and RG-Max.

RG-Aware doesn’t lower the reconstruction-grade bar. It formalizes the floor — a standards floor for transparent practice, not a claim about the legal sufficiency of any particular matter response.

Peter says: “No deterministic version resolution required. No specialized tooling required. Just collection, transparency, and documentation. The four actions map directly to the practitioner questions we published earlier — and they’re things any organization with a litigation hold process can do today.”

The standard is now structured as a staircase (hence, the title of Peter’s blog post), providing a repeatable path for organizational maturity in handling collaborative evidence:

1. RG-Aware: Collect linked content. Disclose limitations. Generate exceptions. Document gaps.
2. RG-Core: Deterministic as-sent version resolution, stable identifiers, relationship integrity, exception determinism, reproducible exports.
3. RG-Plus: Includes RG-Core + effective-dated identity; audit correlation; distinction between access and permission.
4. RG-Max: Includes RG-Plus + accessed-version analysis; expanded artifact coverage; advanced validation.

Peter’s post goes into a lot more detail regarding the changes made to the standard and Craig’s comments about it, so check it out here.

Two important points to address:

First: Craig noted that some workflows for linked files only collect the linked file if the parent email hits first — effectively inverting the family logic and missing responsive content that lives in the linked file, not in the message. Peter notes: “This matters for RG-Aware. The collection obligation isn’t conditioned on the parent message being responsive. If a preserved communication contains a hyperlink to same-tenant content, the linked content is within scope for collection and search on its own terms.”

Couldn’t agree more. In the 2026 State of the Industry report published by eDiscovery Today earlier this year, only 2.5% of 559 respondents to the survey took the draconian position that hyperlinked files shouldn’t be produced at all – meaning almost everyone agrees that they still need to be searched and produced, at least independently (if not with the message).

Second, in his post, Craig renewed his call for meaningful stats on what percentage of cloud attachments are actually modified after transmittal. I remembered that Tom O’Connor and Rachi Messing had interviewed someone from Microsoft a while back, so I asked Tom about it. It was Stefanie Bier, who was (and still is) Principal PM Manager, Data Compliance and Privacy Products at Microsoft back in November 2024. At the time, Stefanie stated that Microsoft’s legal department has found that in over 35% of recent cases, the data in cloud attachments changed between the time it was shared and when it was later accessed. Not scientific, but at least some info from a reputable source.

The process works! The Reconstruction-Grade eDiscovery standard has been updated, based on very useful feedback from an expert in the industry!

So, what do you think? Have you heard of the RGR Standard for eDiscovery? You have now! 😊 Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using DALLE-3, using the term “robot dog looking at its tail quizzically” (with a staircase added via ChatGPT). 😊

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