By Andrew Conry-Murray
 E-discovery is complex. Even under the best of circumstances, it’s fraught with technological and legal booby traps that can snare a company’s IT and legal teams. Toss in vendors’ many e-discovery “solutions,” and there’s room for a lot of confusion.
In an attempt to clarify that muddle, lawyer and consultant George Socha created the Electronic Discovery Reference Model. It diagrams specific steps involved with e-discovery and includes 12,000 pages of documentation that outline requirements for each step. The model provides a framework to help IT and legal teams communicate with each other on what needs to be accomplished. It also helps them vet vendor offerings.
Socha, who started the EDRM project in May 2005 with Tom Gelbman, couldn’t find an organization that would house and promote the model to his satisfaction, so he created his own. He also invited others to join the effort.
“Tom thought we’d get 10 participating organizations,” says Socha. “I was more optimistic—I thought we’d have 15.” Instead, by the end of 2005, they had 63. Today, there are 94, including Oracle, Google, and IBM.
EDRM caught on for three reasons. The first was timing: In 2005, the rules that govern federal civil lawsuits were updated to clarify the role of electronic information, giving judges more leverage to fine, sanction, and rule against litigants who failed to meet the e-discovery rules. Second is the model’s utility: EDRM provides a simple map of a complex terrain—something that hadn’t existed before. Third, Socha and Gelbman made the model and its underlying documentation freely available under a Creative Commons license, which helped it spread.
Today, EDRM projects include an XML schema to move electronic information among third-party e-discovery apps, a body of data that search and analysis tools can be tested against, and a project to create guidelines and protocols for conducting e-discovery searches.
While Socha can be credited with creating EDRM and bringing a measure of order to e-discovery chaos, the model’s future belongs to the group he’s mobilized behind it. Without them, he says, “EDRM simply would not be possible.”
l Paul Maritz l Manjit Singh l Jeff Teper l Sam Ruby l Barack Obama l Nir Zuk l Kirill Sheynkman l Marc Benioff l Avi Kivity l HD Moore l
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