After two years of hard work by a team of 56 practitioners, discovery experts, and judges, the “New Framework” for eDiscovery is here.
In 2019, led by John Rabiej of the George Washington University Law School’s James F. Humphreys Complex Litigation Center, a Steering Committee met and began the process of creating a dynamic, organized discovery framework to realize the promise of the 2015 FRCP proportionality amendments. Buoyed by Evidence Optix®, the patented discovery scoping and proportionality technology developed by Mandi Ross and Bobbi Basile, two highly experienced, innovative leaders in the eDiscovery industry, the team set out to finally give practitioners a manageable, defensible method to reduce eDiscovery cost and burden.
On January 7, 2022, the Discovery Proportionality Model, A New Framework, was published for public comment. The 34-page guidelines include a step-by-step process that ranks custodians based on the claims and defenses of the matter, assesses the burden of each data source, organizes them into a heat map according to priority and burden, and provides analytics to support cost estimations for moving each source from collection through review and production. These cost estimations can then be used for budgeting, negotiations, and discovery motion practice to support proportionality arguments.
The guidelines are located on GW’s Complex Litigation Center website and are now open for public comment until March 31, 2022. The Center is offering a Bench-Bar Conference to guide practitioners through the New Framework on April 21-22, 2022. Visit the conference website to find out more information and register.