EDRM eDiscovery Workflow and Information Governance Training Course

Course overview

Legal teams and their technology partners must move from a matter trigger to a defensible production without losing evidence, over-collecting data, missing preservation obligations, or creating review costs that cannot be justified. The EDRM provides a shared workflow, but many organisations apply its stages inconsistently across legal hold, collection, processing, review, production, and information governance. This course gives participants a practical operating model for managing electronically stored information (ESI) across the full eDiscovery lifecycle.

Participants work through each EDRM stage: information governance, identification, preservation, collection, processing, review, analysis, production, presentation, and post-matter disposition. They learn to translate legal requirements into defensible workflows; scope custodians, data sources, and date ranges; issue and track legal holds; document chain of custody; select processing and review approaches; apply quality control; and create production specifications. The course also examines how retention schedules, data maps, and defensible disposal reduce discovery exposure before litigation or investigation begins.

Instruction combines EDRM-led teaching with a realistic employment dispute case involving Microsoft 365, mobile data, shared drives, and structured business records. Participants use workflow templates, sample hold notices, collection logs, review protocols, and production checklists modelled on RelativityOne, Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, and Nuix Discover practices. Each participant leaves with an EDRM workflow pack for a defined matter, including a data-source map, preservation plan, collection log, review plan, and defensibility checklist.

The course suits legal operations professionals, eDiscovery practitioners, in-house legal teams, records managers, compliance personnel, and IT staff who need a common, auditable approach to ESI handling. It is appropriate for professionals building foundational capability and for experienced staff seeking to formalise workflows across functions.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Map a legal matter to the EDRM stages and define stage-specific ownership, inputs, controls, and outputs
• Create a defensible ESI data map covering custodians, repositories, communication platforms, retention rules, and access constraints
• Draft a legal hold notice, acknowledgement process, reminder schedule, and release procedure
• Apply proportionality criteria to scope custodians, keywords, date ranges, data sources, and collection methods
• Document chain of custody and collection decisions using a matter-level evidence collection log
• Configure a review workflow using batching, coding fields, search terms, privilege controls, and quality-control sampling
• Prepare a production specification covering format, metadata fields, redactions, Bates numbering, exceptions, and delivery validation
• Produce an end-to-end EDRM matter workflow pack with governance controls, escalation points, and audit evidence

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• eDiscovery Analysts and Specialists — who need to run repeatable collection, processing, review, and production workflows
• Legal Operations Managers — who standardise matter processes, suppliers, budgets, and reporting across the legal function
• In-House Counsel — who must direct preservation and disclosure decisions while maintaining defensibility
• Litigation Support Professionals — who coordinate data, review platforms, external counsel, and production requirements
• Records and Information Governance Managers — who align retention, disposal, data mapping, and legal hold processes
• IT, Security, and Compliance Managers — who support lawful preservation and collection from enterprise systems

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should understand the basic purpose of litigation, investigations, regulatory requests, or internal fact-finding and be comfortable working with common business data such as email, documents, chat messages, shared drives, and cloud repositories. Familiarity with legal concepts such as privilege, confidentiality, disclosure, or retention is helpful but not essential. No prior eDiscovery platform administration, coding, forensic collection experience, or RelativityOne licence is required. Complete beginners should expect to learn the terminology and workflow from first principles, while experienced participants can use the exercises to test and improve their existing matter procedures.

Training methodology

The course uses instructor-led EDRM walkthroughs, facilitated discussion of legal and operational decisions, and hands-on work with a continuing employment-dispute case. Participants analyse a matter notice, identify custodians and repositories, prepare hold and collection documents, design a review protocol, and test production choices against a disclosure request. Demonstrations show how the workflow is represented in RelativityOne, Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, and Nuix Discover without requiring platform administration. Group critiques focus on proportionality, defensibility, and evidence trails. The final session converts the case work into an application plan for each participant’s own organisation.

Course outline

Day 1: EDRM foundations and information governance

• EDRM stages, decision gates, and matter-level deliverables
• Information governance as the upstream control for eDiscovery
• ESI categories: email, chat, documents, mobile data, databases, and cloud content
• Enterprise data maps, system owners, and repository inventories
• Retention schedules, records declarations, and defensible disposition
• Matter intake, legal issue framing, and proportionality assessment
• Roles and responsibilities across legal, IT, records, security, and external counsel

Workshop: Participants build a preliminary EDRM process map and data-source inventory for the employment-dispute case.

Day 2: Identification, preservation, and collection

• Custodian interviews and targeted ESI identification
• Legal hold triggers, notice content, acknowledgements, and reminders
• Preservation of Microsoft 365 mailboxes, Teams content, shared drives, and endpoints
• Hold exceptions, escalation paths, and release procedures
• Collection scoping by date range, file type, keyword, and repository
• Chain of custody, hash values, collection logs, and evidence integrity
• Collection method selection: self-collection, remote collection, and vendor-assisted collection

Workshop: Participants draft a hold notice and complete a collection plan with custodians, sources, scope limits, and chain-of-custody controls.

Day 3: Processing, review, and analysis

• Ingestion, de-duplication, deNISTing, metadata extraction, and file normalisation
• Search-term design, iterative query testing, and hit-report interpretation
• RelativityOne workspace concepts, fields, views, batches, and coding layouts
• Microsoft Purview eDiscovery search, hold, and export workflow concepts
• Review protocol design for relevance, confidentiality, privilege, and issue coding
• Technology-assisted review concepts, active learning, and validation considerations
• Quality control sampling, reviewer consistency checks, and escalation workflows

Workshop: Participants create a review protocol, sample coding layout, search strategy, and quality-control plan for the case dataset.

Day 4: Production, presentation, and defensibility

• Production formats: native files, TIFF or PDF images, load files, and OCR text
• Production specifications for metadata, Bates numbering, file naming, and folder structure
• Redaction workflows for personal data, confidentiality, and privileged content
• Privilege logs, withholding rationales, and clawback arrangements
• Production quality assurance, exception reporting, and receiving-party validation
• Nuix Discover workflow concepts for investigation and evidence preparation
• Defensibility narratives, audit trails, and expert or witness-ready documentation

Workshop: Participants prepare a production specification and conduct a quality-assurance review of a simulated production set.

Day 5: Operationalising an EDRM programme

• Matter playbooks, standard operating procedures, and stage-gate approvals
• Metrics for data volume, collection speed, review rate, cost, and exception management
• Supplier governance for law firms, forensic providers, and review vendors
• Cross-border data transfers, privacy constraints, and security controls
• Post-matter disposition, hold release, and lessons-learned reviews
• EDRM maturity assessment and prioritised improvement roadmap
• Executive reporting for legal risk, cost exposure, and governance performance

Workshop: Participants assemble and present an end-to-end EDRM workflow pack and a 90-day implementation plan for their organisation.

Tools & standards covered

EDRM, RelativityOne, Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, Nuix Discover

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions