This just in: discovery isn’t sequential. Joe Pirrotta of ProSearch asks the question: if it’s not, why is your workflow? Good question.

In his blog post titled (wait for it!) Discovery Isn’t Sequential. So Why Is Your Workflow? (available here), Joe notes that our profession is redrawing its map as we speak. EDRM 2.0, the first real update to the reference model in over a decade, is in public comment through the end of July, and it is thoughtful work by people who care deeply about this field. But a reference model has one job: documenting the consensus about how the work flows. It can’t tell you why the work flows that way. It isn’t supposed to.

Two decades of process thinking have trained all of us to describe discovery by its stages. Ask instead what discovery is for, and the stages disappear. Strip it down and you get three answers. You have to find the facts that decide the matter: what happened, who knew, when they knew it. You have to produce responsive material to the other side, because the federal rules say so. And you have to protect the material that must not go along for the ride: privileged communications, personal information, the things that get redacted rather than produced. Three jobs. Every workflow ever built in this industry serves some mix of them.

So, what is the high cost of “what happened?” And how can the sequence be a decision? Find out here, it’s only one click! Unlike Joe’s post, finding out does rely on the sequence of clicking! 😉

So, what do you think? Do you agree that discovery isn’t sequential? 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 stepping through a step diagram”.

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