If you’ve ever had to handle electronically stored information (ESI) in preparation for legal proceedings, you’ve likely heard of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM).
With ESI requests on the up and organizations generating more and more data every minute, it is especially important for legal teams to have a solid understanding of the EDRM and a clear framework for how to manage the complex process of eDiscovery in this flood of data. This article will cover the nine phases of EDRM and l provide you with practical insights you can use to improve your approach to managing digital evidence and eDiscovery.
The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) is a well-known model widely used by legal and compliance professionals that outlines the stages of the eDiscovery process. It was created in 2005 by George Socha and Tom Gelbmann to improve eDiscovery standards.
The EDRM consists of nine distinct stages that outline eDiscovery activities during an investigation. It’s important to note that the EDRM is not a prescriptive model aimed at telling eDiscovery professionals exactly how they should manage the eDiscovery process.
In the words of the creators themselves, “the EDRM diagram represents a conceptual view of the e-discovery process, not a literal, linear, or waterfall model. One may engage in some but not all of the steps outlined in the diagram, or one may elect to carry out the steps in a different order than shown here.”
Understanding the Electronic Discovery Reference Model can help your organization streamline its eDiscovery process, minimize risks, and reduce costs associated with legal proceedings.
The EDRM model is more than just a guide for managing the eDiscovery process; it’s a powerful tool that helps legal and compliance teams work smarter. By following the principles of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, organizations can realize several key benefits:
The EDRM helps legal teams identify and address risks, like improperly managed data or overlooked evidence. By streamlining workflows and reducing unnecessary tasks, it also minimizes costs associated with document review, data storage, and litigation.
Following the nine phases of the EDRM model ensures a clear, repeatable process that can withstand scrutiny in court and reduces the risk of penalties for non-compliance.
The EDRM promotes effective information governance, ensuring that data is organized, secure, and accessible. This not only supports the eDiscovery process but also enhances overall operational efficiency by reducing data silos and improving access to critical information.
As new technologies like cloud storage, messaging apps, and collaboration platforms create complex data environments, the Electronic Discovery Reference Model provides a flexible framework to handle these challenges. Legal teams can adapt it to address evolving data types and maintain compliance with regulations.
The EDRM model breaks the eDiscovery process into nine phases, each designed to guide legal teams through managing ESI efficiently and defensibly.
EDRM 2.0 (2023) Detailed Model, Source: EDRM.net
When organizations neglect key phases of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, they risk losing important data, facing legal penalties for spoliation, or making costly errors during review, such as overlooking privileged information. These missteps can weaken a legal case, increase costs, and damage credibility in court.
Below is an overview of the nine phases of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model:
This foundational phase focuses on managing data effectively within an organization. Good information governance ensures that information is well-organized, compliant, secure, and easily accessible for future use. Key tasks include creating retention policies, mapping data sources, and implementing secure disposal practices.
Solid information governance also helps significantly with eDiscovery. With the average eDiscovery case containing 130GB of data, 10-15 custodians, and 6.5 million individual pages, it’s not hard to see why it was necessary to create a specific model, the Information Governance Reference Model (IGRM), to streamline the eDiscovery process.
Here are some steps that have proven to be effective:
By paying attention to information governance, companies will be better prepared and in a much more advantageous position to meet and respond to eDiscovery requirements at later stages.
As the name suggests, the Identification stage of the EDRM identifies the key pieces of ESI (or key systems containing the ESI) that might be potentially relevant to the legal case in question— as such, it usually occurs with the issuance of a legal hold.
Organizations are legally obligated to preserve any ESI that might be relevant to a legal matter. But knowing what information will end up being important isn’t always easy at the start of the eDiscovery process. With this in mind, the Identification Phase includes any activities—such as case reviews and interviews—that assist in identifying key pieces of electronic information that are likely to be important to a case down the line. Businesses often focus on the comprehensive collection of data, but the easy identification of these records is just as important. You must be able to produce the exact information that is requested, and hiring external experts to help locate highly specific elements of ESI can be expensive.
To ensure that your organization is well prepared for the Identification stage, your organization needs to pay attention and comply with Phase 1 - Information Governance.
Your data needs to be well organized and managed if you’re going to be able to search for and locate it effectively.
Working with a solution like Pagefreezer archiving, can make this stage is a lot simpler.Pagefreezer, for example, automatically collects and stores complete records of all data from your websites, social media accounts, and enterprise collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams. That data is then made accessible to users through native reproduction of the original data , easily searchable with advanced in-text search capabilities. This makes it easy for teams to locate, identify, and produce the ESI they require enabling an easier and more cost-effective eDiscovery process.
Once crucial ESI has been identified, the next step is preserving that evidence for litigation. Failing to do so can result in what is officially known as spoliation—the tampering or destruction of evidence. One of the most common ways to preserve evidence and prevent spoliation is to place data on legal hold. By doing this, legal teams effectively “freeze” information and forbid IT (or any other department) from deleting that information.
In eDiscovery, the validity of data used as evidence must be watertight. As part of the Preservation stage, organizations need to be able to show a robust chain of custody: a chronological account of the handling of evidence.
Chain of custody helps determine the authenticity and the validity of your wider eDiscovery processes. Preserving the chain of custody by following the correct procedures helps organizations preserve and guarantee the authenticity of evidence presented to the courts.
To prepare for the Preservation stage, companies must proactively protect data from spoliation and have a robust legal hold strategy in place. The best way to ensure this is to have a proactive and rapid response to legal hold requests and a thorough ESI preservation process.
A platform like Pagefreezer, for example, supports both the collection and preservation of ESI with an intuitive dashboard that enables ESI to be easily located, formatted, and presented. Your archived data can be securely accessed by external parties, and all ESI is archived with metadata required to make it legally-defensible evidence in a court of law.
After issuing a legal hold, legal teams can get to work collecting the information needed as evidence. Just as in the preservation phase, data needs to be collected in a way that maintains its authenticity and integrity. It may also be necessary to create copies of files so that data can be used in the other stages of the EDRM.
One challenge legal teams are facing increasingly at this phase of the EDRMis the need to correctly collect data from the ever-growing number and types of data sources, like the unstructured data generated by workplace collaboration tools, for example.
It is helpful to have a clear process established when it comes to how your data is collected. Legal teams can also save a great deal of time and effort by working with a platform that removes the margin for error when it comes to collecting evidentiary-quality data.
Pagefreezer, for example, helps you collect and export your data in a manner that preserves all metadata and even provides a SHA-256 digital signature to prove authenticity. This means the data you produce will comply with the rules of collecting digital evidence, and ensure collection is a swift and efficient process.
The Processing stage marks the technical step ahead of attorney review. In this case, processing data means “cleaning it up” by deleting irrelevant data, converting files, and ultimately indexing and organizing the data into respective folders.Processing data is an ongoing activity that needs to be done whenever new information is collected. Many organizations use an eDiscovery platform to assist and simplify this process, such as Exterro, Logikcull and Relativity.
The Processing phase is important – data must be prepared and processed correctly, so it can be used as evidence in the legal case that it is linked to.
Companies can help to ensure a successful processing stage by having good underlying data governance from the outset. They need to make sure files are stored logically and effectively to minimize the need for extensive preparatory work ahead of attorney review.
Having a tool like Pagefreezer can help by enabling data exports to be ingested by your eDiscovery platform, speeding up processing and streamlining legal workflows.
Due to the enormous amount of data, the Review phase represents 80% of litigation costs in the U.S. – a total of $42 billion a year. During Review, legal teams must review all the evidence and ascertain exactly how the information presented relates to the case in question.
To prepare for the Review phase, companies need to ensure their data is in the best possible shape. As previously mentioned, review is not cheap, so make sure you take actions andensure your data is well presented and your sources are uncontested. A clear chain of custody will also help speed up the process.
With Pagefreezer, legal teams can enjoy peace of mind at the Review stage, knowing their data has been located, exported and presented in the best possible way. Questions about data quality or the specific origin of data won’t slow down review because you’ll have all the answers at your fingertips.
At this stage, the context of the evidence submitted will be examined, so the format and source of the data will all be taken into account.
If you’ve optimized your process for all the stages up until this point, you’ll be in a great position, having handed over well-organized, carefully documented, and compliantly handled data from a wide variety of sources.
It is important to remember that even though Analysis represents its own phase, every phase of the EDRM process involves some form of analysis.
In other words, legal teams need to consider how they will present this evidence in a defensible way. With a social media or website post, for instance, the associated metadata would need to be provided in order to prove authenticity.
If you’ve followed the best practices suggested in steps until this point, you should be in a good place. Digital evidence can make or break a case, so it’s really important that the final production is done correctly. There are many cases in which digital evidence was denied in court for not meeting court standards.
Finally, we have the Presentation stage of the EDRM. This is the stage that involves presenting the ESI during a legal case. The presentation phase aims to persuade the court of your position based on the careful preparation and handling of your evidence.
Nowadays, Presentation is mostly done digitally.. It can also include the creation of videos, tutorials or any other form of presentation that ensures clarity and makes key arguments understandable.
At this point your legal team should be safe in the knowledge that you’ve carefully optimized your own data collection, preservation, and presentation processes.
The Presentation stage will be much easier for your organization if they’ve taken proactive steps at every other stage of the EDRM process to get to this point of success.
While the EDRM model provides a valuable framework for managing the eDiscovery process, organizations often face challenges when applying it to real-world scenarios. These challenges stem from evolving technologies, increasing data volumes, and resource constraints. Understanding these limitations can help your organization navigate them effectively.
The sheer amount of ESI that organizations generate can overwhelm legal and IT teams. Unstructured data from collaboration tools, social media, and cloud storage often complicates efforts to organize and process information. Without scalable solutions, managing these growing volumes can become costly and inefficient.
TIP: Invest in scalable eDiscovery tools that handle large data volumes and emerging data types.
eDiscovery can be expensive, especially during the review and analysis phases, which account for the majority of litigation costs. Smaller organizations or those with limited resources may struggle to allocate the necessary time, staff, and budget to follow the eDiscovery reference model effectively.
TIP: Building strong information governance practices reduce the labor burden of later stages like collection and processing.
New data sources, such as workplace chat apps, mobile messaging, and IoT devices, introduce challenges that the original EDRM does not specifically address. Adapting the EDRM model to these emerging technologies requires flexibility and updated tools to ensure compliance and defensibility.
The eDiscovery process often requires input from multiple teams, including legal, IT, and compliance. Misaligned priorities or poor communication between these groups can result in fragmented strategies, leading to gaps in governance or missed deadlines.
TIP: Fostering collaboration between legal, IT, and compliance teams ensures alignment on eDiscovery goals.
Organizations must ensure sensitive data is both protected and easily accessible for legal purposes. Striking this balance is challenging, especially with privacy regulations like GDPR and HIPAA imposing strict requirements on data handling.
TIP: Regularly train staff on the latest privacy regulations and eDiscovery best practices to stay compliant and reduce risks.
Implementing the EDRM effectively requires thoughtful planning, collaboration, and the right tools. Here are some best practices to help your organization streamline the eDiscovery process and get the most value from the Electronic Discovery Reference Model.
The foundation of a successful eDiscovery process is robust information governance. By organizing and managing data proactively, organizations can reduce risks and costs at later stages. Steps to improve governance include:
Investing in the right tools can simplify adhering to the eDiscovery Reference Model and help your team work more efficiently. When selecting eDiscovery solutions, look for:
Editor’s Note: Solutions like Pagefreezer can be particularly helpful, providing comprehensive tools for managing each phase of the EDRM. From capturing and preserving ESI to enabling easy production and presentation, Pagefreezer ensures compliance and efficiency at every step.
Each phase of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model requires careful execution. Here are tips for preparing and executing key phases:
eDiscovery is most effective when legal, IT, and compliance teams work together. Establish clear roles and responsibilities, encourage regular communication, and align priorities across departments. This collaboration helps ensure data is managed consistently and eDiscovery goals are met.
eDiscovery is not a one-time effort. Regularly audit your processes, monitor compliance, and stay informed about changes in regulations or technology. Continuous improvement ensures your organization remains efficient, compliant, and ready for future legal challenges.
By adopting these best practices, organizations can implement the EDRM model effectively, reduce risks, and improve their overall approach to eDiscovery.
The Electronic Discovery Reference Model is an important framework for efficient, compliant eDiscovery. By structuring the management of electronically stored information through its nine phases, the EDRM model simplifies complex processes, reduces risks, and strengthens legal defensibility.
Adopting the eDiscovery reference model helps organizations align legal, IT, and compliance teams, streamline workflows, and leverage advanced tools to handle the challenges of modern data management. By following its principles, you can shift eDiscovery from a reactive task to a proactive strategy that supports both business and legal goals.