How the EDRM Guides Decision Making

A recent eDiscovery Today blog post discusses Craig Ball’s assertion that questioning the Electronic Discovery Reference Model’s (EDRM’s) structure misses the point. Ball recently received a marketing email through his Ball in Your Court website, asking whether EDRM is “structurally prepared for investigations.” In response, he states that EDRM was never intended to function as a structure, workflow, or operational system.

It is a reference model — a conceptual framework designed to map the key stages and relationships involved in handling electronically stored information (ESI) as evidence. Rather than telling you how to do something, it maps what needs to be done. Evaluating it as though it were a workflow or platform misses its purpose entirely.

The left-to-right EDRM diagram, spanning stages from information governance through presentation, has always represented a reference arc rather than a rigid sequence. Practitioners have long understood that real-world discovery does not proceed in a linear fashion. Instead, stages overlap, repeat, and run in parallel depending on the matter. The model accommodates this flexibility precisely because it describes what must be addressed, not how to execute it.

Indeed, there is a growing emphasis on unified investigation infrastructure, where legal,  security, and compliance functions operate within coordinated workflows. The evolution reflects legitimate operational needs around governance, tooling, and process design. This emphasis, however, is fundamentally a discussion about workflows, not the role of a conceptual model. 

EDRM remains a reference model that helps teams identify, preserve, collect, process, and produce data defensibly. It does not, and was never meant to, serve as software, case management, or workflow automation. Properly understood, EDRM continues to guide effective decision making alongside whatever infrastructure organizations choose to build.