eDiscovery (electronic discovery) is the process of identifying, preserving, collecting, processing, reviewing, and producing electronically stored information (ESI) in response to litigation, regulatory investigations, or internal investigations. It is the legal industry’s largest and most mature data-engineering problem — a single second-request response can ingest tens of millions of documents, and a single missed privileged document can become a malpractice claim.
The EDRM model
The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) is the industry-standard map of the eDiscovery workflow. Nine stages, executed (mostly) in order:
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1. Information governance | Pre-litigation: data retention policies, hold readiness |
| 2. Identification | What custodians and data sources are in scope? |
| 3. Preservation | Issue legal holds; freeze deletion |
| 4. Collection | Pull data from email, file shares, Slack, mobile, cloud apps |
| 5. Processing | Deduplicate, extract metadata, OCR, normalize formats |
| 6. Review | Attorneys (or AI) tag documents — responsive, privileged, hot |
| 7. Analysis | Build the case narrative from reviewed documents |
| 8. Production | Produce responsive, non-privileged docs to the requesting party |
| 9. Presentation | Use produced documents at deposition or trial |
Most eDiscovery software (Relativity, Everlaw, Logikcull) covers stages 4-8 of EDRM. Stages 1-3 are increasingly handled by information-governance tooling inside Microsoft Purview, Google Vault, or dedicated legal-hold software.
Why review is the cost center
Review is where 70%+ of eDiscovery spend lives. Until recently, review meant first-pass attorneys (often contract reviewers) eyeballing each document at $50-150/hour. A 1M-document review takes 5,000-15,000 attorney hours, so $500K-$2M in review cost alone before any second-pass quality control.
Two waves of automation have attacked this:
- Technology Assisted Review (TAR). Predictive coding workflows since the early 2010s. A senior attorney trains a model on a seed set; the model ranks remaining documents by responsiveness; lower-ranked documents are reviewed less intensively or not at all. Court-accepted in most US jurisdictions.
- LLM-assisted review. Since 2023, generative AI handles first-pass review with a quality bar that is competitive with junior contract reviewers on common categories (responsive/non-responsive, privileged, hot). Everlaw, Relativity, and DISCO have all shipped LLM features; specialist players (Casetext’s CARA, Luminance Discovery) compete head-on.
LLM-assisted review is shifting the cost curve dramatically — well-run cases can now do first-pass review for 10-20% of historical cost — but courts and opposing counsel are still calibrating on what AI-assisted production requires in terms of disclosure and validation.
When does a company need eDiscovery software?
For most non-litigation companies: never. eDiscovery is procured per-matter through outside counsel, who select the eDiscovery vendor for that case. The company never directly licenses Relativity or Everlaw.
Companies that bring eDiscovery in-house typically share two signals:
- Recurring litigation or regulatory volume. Financial services firms, healthcare, large tech, government contractors. The matter cadence justifies a dedicated team and tooling.
- Sensitive data they don’t want leaving the four walls. Some in-house teams prefer to handle collection and processing internally before handing reviewed productions to outside counsel.
In-house eDiscovery is a Legal Ops responsibility, distinct from the matter management function. Tooling decisions (which platform, which AI vendor) sit with the Head of eDiscovery or Head of Legal Ops.
Why eDiscovery matters to Legal Ops generally
Even Legal Ops teams that don’t run eDiscovery in-house should care about it because:
- Outside-counsel spend on eDiscovery is often the single biggest line item in litigation budgets. Legal spend management tooling tracks it; AFA structures (capped per-document review) increasingly govern it.
- Information governance choices made by Legal Ops upstream (retention, communications policies) determine the eDiscovery cost downstream. A 90-day Slack retention policy is a multi-million-dollar decision when the next investigation comes.
Related
- What is Legal Ops? — the function that owns eDiscovery vendor and policy decisions
- Best ediscovery platforms — head-to-head comparison
- Relativity — the dominant enterprise eDiscovery platform
- Everlaw — leading AI-native challenger
- Logikcull — self-service eDiscovery for smaller matters