E-Discovery Project Planning
E-Discovery Project Planning
Project planning is where a matter's defensibility is won or lost. A candidate must be able to translate a case theory into a scoped, budgeted, resourced plan. Core concepts include the EDRM framework (information governance, identification, preservation, collection, processing, review, analysis, production, presentation), the litigation hold process, proportionality under the Federal Rules (notably Rule 26(b)(1) as amended in 2015), the ESI protocol/agreed order, custodian and data-source mapping, and review strategy (keyword, TAR/predictive coding, or sampling). Understand how a project charter defines scope, deliverables, and roles, and how budgeting models (per-GB, per-document, hourly) shift risk between client and provider.
Traps in questions: confusing preservation with collection (preservation is a duty; collection is a tactical step); treating proportionality as a cap on relevance rather than a balancing of burden and benefit; assuming a litigation hold is sufficient without verification or periodic refresh; and forgetting that planning must include quality control and validation (sampling, elusion testing) before production.
Rule of thumb: plan backward from the production deadline. Start with the producing format and privilege log requirements, then work back through review capacity, processing volume, collection scope, and preservation triggers. If any step lacks an owner and a date, the plan is incomplete.
Worked example: A matter has 1.2 million documents, a 90-day production deadline, and a review team of six reviewers at 500 docs/day each. Total capacity is 270,000 documents-far short of the corpus. The correct planning response is to reduce scope (custodians, date ranges, deduplication), deploy TAR with validation, or negotiate a phased production-not to assume overtime will close a 4x gap.