eDiscovery FAQ

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 allows us to 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.

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. Engagements are led by senior personnel from intake through expert testimony.

We scope based on custodian count, data-source mix, and review complexity. Every engagement is scoped to the matter, with the approach and budget agreed up front — contact us for an estimate. Reporting cadence is set with the client, with executive-level summaries available for the audit committee or board.

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, we deploy targeted forensic collection.

Yes. Our team employs defensible methodologies to identify, preserve, and collect ESI from email, mobile devices, social media, cloud applications, and messaging platforms including Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord where legally permissible.

Cost reduction comes from disciplined upstream decisions: analytics, technology-assisted review, targeted culling, tiered review workflows, proportionality arguments, narrow custodian sets, date-range and source filtering, deduplication, and threading. We routinely reduce reviewable documents by 60–90% before review begins.

We deploy multi-layer privilege protocols including keyword and concept screens, dedicated privilege reviewers, second-pass quality control, and clawback agreements under FRE 502(d). Privileged-document logs are produced to your specifications.

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).

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 as testifying experts post-conference.

Retain an expert when the opposing party challenges your 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 testified in federal and state courts, AAA and JAMS arbitrations, and SEC and DOJ proceedings.

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, including GDPR, UK GDPR, China PIPL, Switzerland's revFADP, Brazil's LGPD, and country-specific blocking statutes.