Right Discovery Staff Writer
Discovery economics have flipped since the print era—with some studies suggesting discovery can approach a majority of federal civil litigation spend. The "e-" prefix is now the default state, not a novelty bolt-on.
Before the internet
Counsel once warehoused banker boxes; every photocopy nickel nudged teams toward digital scans as soon as storage caught up.
eDiscovery software 1.0
Early 1980s tools like Concordance and Summation translated paper to TIFF surrogates—easier to herd than cardboard, yet still labor intensive.
Formats and chaos
Spreadsheets, early cloud silos, and brittle databases each introduced scalability limits—human data entry errors, deployment drag, or training debt.
EDRM
Tom Gelbmann and George Socha formalized the Electronic Discovery Reference Model in 2005—nine stages still shorthand for defensible ESI choreography.
For a video primer from CEO Kevin M. Clark, see our companion piece EDRM: The Foundational Framework….
eDiscovery software 2.0
Cloud-native platforms—Everlaw, Relativity/RelativityOne, Reveal, and peers—now assume collaboration, security, and analytics by default.
Technology-assisted review
Empirical work in Roitblat et al. (2009) framed TAR parity with linear review; judicial acceptance followed when transparency beat pride. Continuous active learning (TAR 2.0) sharpened recall while shrinking seed-set theology.
What is next
Messaging explosion—Slack, Teams, ephemeral mobile chat—outpaces traditional review metaphors; NLP and unified ingestion are the next bottleneck to solve.
References
- Sullivan, Casey C., "Slow, Expensive, Lopsided Discovery Leads Court to Split Cost," Logikcull (blog).
- Logikcull, "5 Reasons to Leave Legacy eDiscovery Software Behind."
- Singhal & Vaughan, "The Evolution of eDiscovery," Venio Systems (2022).
- EDRM, edrm.net.
- Roitblat, Herbert L., et al., "Document Categorization in Legal Electronic Discovery," JASIST (2009), doi:10.1002/asi.21233.
Topics: eDiscovery history, EDRM, TAR, Right Discovery