How do corporate legal teams reduce eDiscovery collection volumes without missing key ESI? Shelley Bougnague of Cloudficient discusses that here!

As discussed in her post titled (wait for it!) How Do Corporate Legal Teams Reduce eDiscovery Collection Volumes Without Missing Key ESI? (available here), Shelley discusses that Traditional collection defaults to volume because it lacks context. Custodian lists are built from interviews, org charts, and educated guesses about who was involved, which produces either over-inclusive lists or gaps where relevant people are missed. Without visibility into custodian behavior, data relationships, and content relevance before collection, the safe choice is to collect broadly and sort it out later.

That choice carries a cost on both sides. The volume of electronically stored information keeps expanding across enterprise systems, cloud platforms, collaboration tools, and mobile devices, and broad collection inflates processing, hosting, and review costs across the discovery lifecycle. The risk runs the other way too: incomplete collections invite spoliation claims, sanctions, and adverse inferences. Overcollection compounds the problem by burying the genuinely relevant evidence inside a much larger set, which makes downstream review slower and more expensive. The driver of this dilemma is the absence of context at the point of identification, and that is where a better approach has to start. Understanding why traditional eDiscovery struggles to explain what actually happened is the first step toward adopting smarter collection strategies.

So, how do you identify the right custodians? What is context-aware collection? And how does AI-powered early case assessment reduce collection scope – defensibly? Find out here, it’s only one click! This is key ESI you won’t want to miss! 😉

So, what do you think? Is your organization stuck in preserve and collect everything mode? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using DALL-E 3, using the term “robot lawyer wearing a suit standing behind a human lawyer and pointing to a workstation”.

Disclosure: Cloudficient is an Educational Partner and sponsor of eDiscovery Today

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.