Frequently Asked Questions

Engage at the earliest credible signal of a dispute or investigation — a litigation hold trigger, a subpoena, a regulator inquiry, or a credible internal allegation.

Early engagement lets us scope preservation obligations, advise on the Rule 26(f) conference, and prevent spoliation. Late engagement narrows your strategic options and can expose the organization to sanctions, adverse-inference instructions, or motions to compel. We recommend pre-litigation playbooks so triggering events route to qualified counsel and forensic teams within hours, not weeks. Learn more about our eDiscovery consulting and strategy services.

We are practitioners, not order-takers.

Our team includes attorneys, court-appointed special masters, and forensic technologists who have lived through the litigation, regulatory, and judicial sides of these matters. We deliver strategic counsel — not just processing throughput — and our engagements are led by senior personnel from intake through expert testimony. Clients retain us when the matter is complex enough that vendor-grade execution is not enough.

We scope based on custodian count, data-source mix, and review complexity, and we offer fixed-fee, hourly, and hybrid pricing models.

Reporting cadence is set with the client — typically weekly status reports for active matters, with executive-level summaries suitable for the audit committee or board on request. We provide cost forecasts before each EDRM phase so there are no surprises, and we benchmark our pricing against industry-standard per-GB and per-hour rates so clients can validate cost discipline.

We use platform-native eDiscovery and admin APIs to capture data with original metadata intact — Microsoft Purview, Google Vault, the Slack Discovery API, and equivalents for Teams, Zoom, Webex, and Box.

Where native tools are insufficient (for example, with ephemeral messages, third-party connectors, or unmanaged personal accounts referenced in business communications), we deploy targeted forensic collection. Every step is logged for chain of custody and is reproducible by opposing experts. See our ESI preservation and collection capabilities.

Yes — mobile, social, and ephemeral-app evidence is now central to most modern eDiscovery matters.

Our team employs defensible methodologies to identify, preserve, and collect ESI from email, mobile devices, social media accounts, cloud applications, and messaging platforms — including Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord where legally permissible. Mobile and ephemeral-app evidence has been outcome-determinative in several of our matters, including high-profile sports, financial, and intellectual-property disputes. We also advise on litigation holds for BYOD environments and on the legal risks of auto-deleting message platforms.

Cost reduction comes from disciplined upstream decisions, not from cutting review quality.

We combine analytics, technology-assisted review (TAR / predictive coding), targeted culling, and tiered review workflows to shrink the review population before it ever reaches first-pass reviewers. Real savings are unlocked through proportionality arguments, narrow custodian sets, date-range and source filtering, deduplication, threading, and email-domain analysis. For high-volume matters, we routinely reduce reviewable documents by 60–90% before review begins. See our ESI processing and hosting service.

We deploy multi-layer privilege protocols — keyword and concept screens, dedicated privilege reviewers, second-pass quality control, and clawback agreements under FRE 502(d) where appropriate.

Privileged-document logs are produced to your specifications, and we work directly with outside counsel on close calls. For high-stakes matters we recommend a 502(d) order entered at the Rule 26(f) conference to limit subject-matter waiver exposure if a privileged document slips through. Our document review and production workflows are calibrated to the privilege risk profile of the matter.

A defensible eDiscovery process is one we can document, explain under oath, and replicate.

That means written collection protocols, validated tools, contemporaneous chain-of-custody records, and decisions that align with proportionality under FRCP Rule 26(b)(1). Federal and state courts increasingly scrutinize these workflows — an indefensible process invites motions to compel, sanctions, and adverse-inference instructions. Our methodology is grounded in the EDRM framework and Sedona Conference principles, with every step logged and reviewable by opposing counsel or the court.

We prepare counsel with a defensible position on data sources, custodians, search methodology, production format, privilege handling, and proportionality before the conference.

Clients use us as the technical voice in the room — either as consulting experts or, where strategically appropriate, as testifying experts post-conference. We also draft proposed ESI protocols, 502(d) orders, and search-term exchange schedules tailored to the matter.

Retain an expert when the opposing party challenges your collection or production methodology, when a court orders a forensic protocol, when sanctions are at stake, or when complex technical issues require credible explanation to a judge or jury.

Our experts have provided testimony in federal and state courts, AAA and JAMS arbitrations, and SEC and DOJ proceedings — covering chain of custody, deletion artifacts, system metadata, TAR validation, and proportionality. Several of our team members have also served as court-appointed special masters in complex eDiscovery disputes. See our expert testimony and reporting service.

We map the data inventory against every applicable jurisdiction and design collection and transfer workflows that satisfy both U.S. discovery obligations and foreign data-protection requirements.

That includes GDPR, UK GDPR, China PIPL, Switzerland's FADP, Brazil's LGPD, and country-specific blocking statutes (France, Quebec, Saudi Arabia, etc.). Where Hague Convention procedures or in-country review are required, we coordinate with local counsel and process accordingly — including in-country processing centers when data export is restricted.