eDiscovery Daily Blog

• May 7, 2015

It’s hard to believe, but ten years ago this month the leading standards organization for the eDiscovery market was launched. Launched in May 2005, the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (now simply known as EDRM) was created to address the lack of standards and guidelines in the electronic discovery market. This week, EDRM moved into its second decade with its annual Spring Workshop in St. Paul, MN.

At the first meeting in May 2005, there were 35 initial members, according to Tom Gelbmann of Gelbmann & Associates, co-founder of EDRM along with George Socha of Socha Consulting LLC. Check out the preliminary first draft of the EDRM diagram – it has evolved quite a bit to its current form today! Among the participants in that first meeting were a number of eDiscovery providers and, according to Gelbmann, they asked “Do you really expect us all to work together?” The answer was “yes”, and the question hasn’t been asked again. Today, there are over 370 members from 119 participating organizations including eDiscovery providers, law firms and corporations (as well as some individual participants).

As usual, in the first morning of the workshop, each team provided a status update of their accomplishments over the past year as well as current deliverables in progress. A few highlights:

• Information Governance Reference Model (IGRM): Reed Irvin of Viewpointe provided the IGRM update, which included reiteration of the IGRM mission statement, a review of the evolution of the IGRM model (covered by us here, among other places), a review of group accomplishments over the past year (including this white paper, which is currently being updated) and discussion of the importance of information governance today.
• Data Set: Eric Robi of Elluma Discovery provided the update for the Data Set team, which is working on several new data sets useful for testing that will include multiple levels of corrupted and encrypted files, as well as a set of email boxes containing fictitious content prepared to demonstrate a case and expects to announce a release as soon as next week.
• Metrics: Tiana Van Dyk of Burnet, Duckworth & Palmer and other team members gave the update for the Metrics team, which is currently working on enhancements to the eDiscovery Maturity Self-Assessment Test (eMSAT-1) released last October, as well as continued efforts on new metrics calculators (last month, they rolled out a new EDRM Data Calculator to go with previously released calculators here, here, here and here).
• Processing Standards: Greg Houston of kCura gave the update, which discussed the efforts to update the first release of the standards document that was rolled out in March.

As always, the meetings continued with breakout sessions for each of the teams, enabling them to further their progress toward deliverables for the coming year. Also, this year’s meeting included a session to discuss perspectives from EDRM’s growing corporate and government entity membership, with several ideas discussed regarding what EDRM can do to help to ease pain points for these organizations in information governance and eDiscovery, resulting in launching a new Corporate Project Team led by David Yerich of United Healthcare and Robert Stangler of Ameriprise Financial, with several initiatives planned. Corporate participation at the spring workshop was good with about 25% of the attendees representing corporate perspectives.

Having participated in EDRM since 2006 (and now an Education Partner), I can say that one of the most enjoyable aspects of attending the meetings is the networking with fellow industry professionals and EDRM provides several opportunities for that, with a cocktail reception the first (arrival) evening and a dinner after the first day’s sessions. Where else can you help to standardize the information governance and eDiscovery industries, while sharing stories (and a few laughs) with fellow industry professionals?

For more information about joining EDRM, click here for more reasons to join, here for answers to frequently asked questions and here for fees for participating (if you’re a corporation or government entity, it’s free!).

So, what do you think? Are you a member of EDRM? If not, why not? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.