Started in 2005, the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) Project was created to address the lack of standards and guidelines in the electronic discovery market.  EDRM is a great reference tool to develop guidelines and standards for ediscovery consumers and service providers.  EDRM helps reduce the cost, time and manual work associated with ediscovery.

Referencing the  accompanying EDRM diagram on their web site, the 8 areas lay out a structured foundation for facilitating the implementation of an archiving software solution.  This makes life easier with providing all the players standard guidelines, as part of the archiving and information retrieval process related to legal and government requests.

We will cover a cursory overview of EDRM.

Information Management
Getting your electronic house in order to mitigate risk and expenses should electronic discovery become an issue. This covers the initial creation of electronically stored information all the way through its final disposition.

Identification
This refers to the process of learning the location of all data which a company has a duty to preserve and potentially disclose in an upcoming  legal proceeding.

Preservation
Preservation for electronic discovery has become a complicated, multi-faceted, steadily-changing concept in recent years.  Certain suggested standards and guidelines have been emerging to provide checklists for those preparing to respond to electronic requests for production.

Collection
The acquisition of electronic information, which is  tagged as potentially relevant in the identification phase.

Processing
Electronic discovery processing must accommodate a wide variety of unstructured data, handle each form in a manner appropriate to its file type, and generate output that is structured in accordance with review requirements that often vary from one law firm to the next.

Review
At its most basic level the document review is used to sort out documents the company will actually provide and privileged documents that will be withheld.

Analysis
During this process, important knowledge for a case can be discerned from the large body of collected documents and email messages.

Production
With the unprecedented increase in the amount of electronic data that is being created and stored in the corporate environment, there has been a corresponding increase in focus on how that data that has been collected and reviewed is ultimately produced in civil litigation and regulatory investigation

Presentation
Displaying electronic information in front of audiences (i.e. depositions, hearings, trials, etc.), especially in native or near native file formats.

For more details on EDRM visit the Electronic Discovery Reference Model Project web site.