Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2010-05-14 07:56:07Format, images and links may no longer function correctly. Everyone may be familiar with the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), but many of you may not know much about the organization that created this iconic representation of the eDiscovery lifecycle. EDRM turned six this year and has grown to over 300 participants that span providers, firm, corporate and independent discovery practitioners. The record attendance this year (104 participants) reflected the uptick in business and company’s willingness to commit budget to eDiscovery initiatives. The initial EDRM diagram project has grown to nine active projects developing non-commerical eDiscovery resources and guides. George Socha and Tom Gelbmann (of the Socha-Gelbmann Survey) coordinate the twice yearly meetings and tirelessly support all of the group conference calls and web resources throughout the year. The May gathering is a chance to report on project progress and set new goals for the next year. Each project has two to three leaders and 10-90 individual and organizational participants. All public materials are freely available for use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States license as long as you properly attribute them to the EDRM project. The projects follow a consensus based approach and participants of all backgrounds and experience levels are welcome.
Project highlights:
- Evergreen Project has created second level standardized diagrams for each of the EDRM phases along with expanded, updated content. They continue to make sure that the diagram and core materials are kept current and relevant.
- Metrics Project has created a metrics cube visualization, metrics tools (MS Excel based), case studies and has started work on the second generation of standardized codes to measure time, volume and cost within eDiscovery. Jack Halprin (Autonomy) and myself passed the leadership torch to the capable hands of Shamir Colloff (Evolve Discovery) and Stephen Doherty (eDiscovery Management Associates). The project is coordination with the Ledes Oversight Committee on the development of new UTMBS codes to support eDiscovery billing.
- XML Project continues to refine the XML data transfer standard as archiving, SaaS and discovery projects announce export/import compliance.
- Search Project published an extremely detailed and timely Search Guide that explores the search technologies, methodologies, best practices and more. They are focused on nine problem profile cases that explore search issues and solutions in real world scenarios.
- Information Management Reference Model Project (IMRM) has made a draft complementary model for correlating Information Management activities such as Record Managment, compliance, Enterprise Content Management and more. Although this is a relatively new project, it has attracted good participation from organizations that have realized that eDiscovery is now part of the business process, not just a legal fire drill.
- Code of Conduct project continues to define guiding ground rules to cover acceptable behavior of the typical discovery players and relationships.
- Jobs Project is developing job descriptions and other resources to support the growing eDiscovery career path.
- PR Project continues to brainstorm on new ways to raise public awareness including podcats, webinars, monthly updates and even an EDRM Game show at Legal Tech West starring Jason Velasco (KPMG). We got a preview and you too can test your knowledge to be proclaimed an eDiscovery Guru!
- Data Set Project has assembled three publicly available data sets that you can download for testing. They are supplying the Legal Track data set for the 2010 TREC Conference. Our industry needs these kinds of real world data sets for acceptance, validation, regression and other tests by the software developers, service providers and end users. Without reasonable diligence testing, how can you rely on your chosen technology?
- Enron Data Set – 132 custodians in PST files containing the recreated emails and native file attachments. The current set contains over 1 million email and deduplicates down to several hundred thousand unique messages.
- Software Reference Data Sets expands the NIST hash list of public program and operating system files from the NSRL. The NIST list mostly comprises hash values of the installation files from the software manufacturers rather than the actual installed application and system files as we find them on desktops and laptops.
- Probabilistic Hash Data Set is an ambitious project to assemble an anonymous hash list of large public and private litigation production data sets that could be used to screen out files with hash values that have occurred many times across many sources.
This should give you some idea of the EDRM Projects and hopefully encourage you to explore the resources available at www.EDRM.net. You can find information about individual and organizational participation here. I hope to see more of you at a future gathering or hear your perspective and feedback on the EDRM site.