Ediscovery for Corporate Counsel: Challenges, Strategies, and Tactics

As data volumes explode and regulatory scrutiny intensifies, corporate counsel face mounting pressure to keep pace. Data collected for discovery, especially corporate ediscovery, is expanding dramatically, in both volume and type – documents may be shared across multiple data collaboration tools, including Gmail, Google Drive, Zoom, Slack, and Dropbox, and often includes multiple versions of collaborative docs. 

A Rand study estimated that U.S. civil cases typically contain around 130 gigabytes of data, or roughly 6.5 million pages of information. This places significant demands on corporate legal teams, which face increasing pressure to manage growing volumes of electronically stored information (ESI) while staying abreast of current technology and complying with data privacy regulations.

Keeping ediscovery efficient and cost-effective can be a massive headache, with 69% of general counsels globally facing moderate to significant cost pressure. 

In this guide, we will explore the challenges of the corporate ediscovery landscape and outline the key strategies to overcome them, including the use of appropriate corporate ediscovery software and services.

Data volume and complexity

With the exponential growth of electronically stored information (ESI), corporate ediscovery has become increasingly complex. Even cases with relatively narrow facts can quickly encompass thousands — or even millions — of documents, all requiring collection, processing, and review. To manage this scale, legal departments increasingly rely on advanced capabilities like email threading, near-duplicate detection, and AI-driven analytics.

Get the ebook: Learn today’s considerations and best practices in handling complex data types in ediscovery. 

Controlling data volume early through targeted minimization and advanced filtering is critical for reducing downstream costs and ensuring efficient, defensible workflows.

Let’s take a closer look at the core strategies that help manage scale in ediscovery for corporate counsel without losing control:

Data minimization strategies 

The less irrelevant data you collect, the less you have to store, search, and review. By starting data minimization before collection, legal teams can reduce risk and cost without compromising defensibility.

Key considerations for your data minimization strateg include:

• Automate deletion and retention policies: Use automated tools to regularly purge non-essential data in accordance with your retention schedule, freeing up resources and minimizing manual effort.
• Eliminate redundant, obsolete, or trivial (ROT) data: Proactively identify and dispose of unnecessary files and records before they enter the discovery process, reducing storage and compliance costs from the outset.
• Implement targeted collection protocols: Set clear criteria for what data sources and timeframes are in scope, so only potentially relevant information is preserved and collected.

Be aware of the specific laws pertinent to your region and industry, and never delete or alter data when anticipating litigation or a legal hold. These best practices are guidelines only, and should be followed only when not in conflict with your legal, ethical, or regulatory duties.

With DISCO Ediscovery, our clients are always in control of their data, and our platform facilitates data minimization practices. Contact our team to learn more.

Early case assessment (ECA)

Early case assessment helps your team quickly grasp the scope, risks, and potential costs of a matter before committing significant resources to full review or litigation. By analyzing a targeted data set early, your legal team can make informed decisions about strategy, settlement, and resource allocation.

Key steps for effective ECA include:

• Identify key documents and data patterns early: Use analytics and targeted review to surface the most relevant materials, prioritize what requires deeper analysis, and spot potential privilege or risk issues at the outset.
• Assess case merits, risks, and likely costs: Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the case, estimate potential exposure, and forecast discovery costs based on early findings, enabling smarter decisions about whether to litigate, settle, or negotiate.

Refine review strategy and scope: Use insights from ECA to define search terms, custodians, and data sources for subsequent review phases, ensuring resources are focused where they matter most.

Advanced technology integration

As ediscovery data volumes grow, legal teams need integrated, scalable tools that unify processes and deliver actionable insights. The right technology connects people, data, and workflows for greater speed, accuracy, and control.

What to look for in advanced tech to support corporate ediscovery:

• Apply conceptual and semantic search: Integrated platforms leverage advanced search capabilities to reveal themes, relationships, and patterns that go beyond basic keywords. This helps you quickly surface critical evidence and reduce time spent on irrelevant material. For example, DISCOS’s Cecilia AI goes beyond basic keyword searches, asking questions in plain English, analyzing themes, and instantly surfacing the most relevant documents, all with cited sources and AI-powered insights.
• Centralize processing and filtering: Unified ediscovery solutions aggregate and process data from diverse sources — email, chat, cloud drives, and more — within a single workflow. This eliminates silos, streamlines handoffs, and ensures consistent application of review protocols and quality controls. Today’s legal departments trust DISCO Ediscovery to help them manage and review vast, complex data sets with intuitive capabilities, so they can take on as much or as little work themselves before engaging costly outside counsel.
• Leverage real-time analytics dashboards: Built-in analytics and visualization tools like those in DISCO Ediscovery provide immediate visibility into data trends, review progress, and potential risks. Monitor key metrics, identify gaps, and adjust workflows to improve proactive decision-making and audit readiness. 

Integrate legal hold and preservation workflows: Modern ediscovery platforms should seamlessly connect legal hold management with data processing and review so your team can issue holds, notify custodians, preserve data in place, and track compliance from a single interface — like DISCO Hold, the enterprise hold platform that makes your preservation process up to 85% more efficient and ensures defensibility from the very start of every matter.

Data sensitivity

Corporate legal teams often sit at the center of the organization’s most sensitive matters: internal investigations, litigation and regulatory risk, mergers & acquisitions, corporate governance, intellectual property and trade secrets. 

Additionally, the legal team must protect work product and privileged communications.

When discovery starts, protecting that information becomes just as critical as producing it. A single misstep can expose strategy, breach compliance protocols, or jeopardize privilege. To minimize risk and ensure compliance, legal teams must implement workflows that consistently protect sensitive content throughout the entire discovery process.

Here’s how to manage discovery without putting sensitive data at risk:

Role-based access controls (RBAC)

Role-based access controls (RBAC) help legal teams precisely manage sensitive data by defining who can access specific information based on their role or team function. This approach ensures only authorized personnel can view or handle sensitive materials.

Key considerations for role-based access controls (RBAC) include:

• Restrict data access by job function and need-to-know: Assign permissions so users only see information necessary for their responsibilities. This reduces the risk of unauthorized disclosure and supports compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR and HIPAA.
• Adjust access as roles or matters change: To ensure ongoing protection of sensitive data, update or revoke permissions immediately when team members change roles, leave the organization, or when a matter’s status changes. 

Maintain auditable access records: To maintain defensibility and regulatory requirements for audit trails, log all access events to provide a clear record of who accessed what data and when.

Encryption

Encryption protects sensitive data by making it unreadable to unauthorized users even if systems are compromised. By applying strong encryption protocols at every stage, legal teams ensure that privileged, personal, or regulated information remains secure, whether it’s stored or transmitted.

Key considerations for using encryption to protect sensitive data:

• Apply industry-standard encryption for data at rest and in transit: Use robust algorithms like AES-256 for stored data and TLS 1.2+ for data moving across networks to safeguard information from interception or unauthorized access.
• Ensure end-to-end protection: Maintain confidentiality throughout the data lifecycle by encrypting files on servers, on devices, and during transfer between users, systems, or cloud platforms.

Support regulatory compliance: Encryption is recognized as a best practice for meeting privacy and security requirements under laws such as GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA.

Data classification frameworks

Not all data is equally sensitive or requires the same level of protection. 

A clear classification system helps you determine what needs the most protection, so you know which controls to apply without overburdening your processes. 

The key roles of data classification frameworks include:

• Assess the nature and sensitivity of your data: Start by identifying what types of information you have (e.g., personal information, financial records, intellectual property, public data). Consider how damaging unauthorized access, alteration, or deletion would be for each type.
• Define classification levels and criteria: Use standardized categories such as public, internal, confidential, and restricted (or highly confidential). Assign each data type to a level based on sensitivity, regulatory requirements (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA), business value, and accessibility needs.
• Document and communicate your classification policy: Make sure everyone understands the classification scheme, what belongs in each category, and the rationale behind it. Regularly review and update classifications as your data, regulations, or business needs change.

Refer to implementation controls: Once data is classified, apply appropriate controls — such as access restrictions, encryption, retention, and audit logging — based on the assigned classification.

Legal hold procedures

When litigation hits, preservation can’t wait. Legal hold procedures define the step-by-step process for ensuring all relevant data is preserved, custodians are informed, and compliance is maintained throughout the matter.

It’s critical to comply with regulatory frameworks and best practices when a legal hold is in place. Considerations include:

• Identify and notify key custodians promptly: As soon as a legal hold is triggered, determine which individuals control potentially relevant data. Issue clear, timely legal hold notices to these custodians, outlining their preservation obligations and the types of data in scope.
• Track acknowledgments and ongoing compliance: Monitor responses to legal hold notices and require custodians to acknowledge their obligations. Follow up as needed to confirm continued compliance, and document all communications for defensibility.
• Document and update the hold process: Maintain clear records of all legal hold actions, including issuance, acknowledgments, reminders, and any changes to the scope or custodians involved. Update the hold as new information emerges or as custodians join or leave the matter.
• Integrate with case management: Ensure that legal holds are coordinated with the broader case management system to provide visibility across matters, streamline workflows, and facilitate reporting.

Need help documenting your in-house hold process? Check out our free ebook, The Legal Hold Playbook, which guides you through setting up a formal document that codifies your procedures and workflows.

Automated redaction tools

Redaction protects what shouldn’t be disclosed, including privileged language, personally identifying information (PII), and trade secrets. Automating this process reduces errors, speeds up review, and creates a defensible audit trail.

Automated redaction tools for ediscovery should offer the following capabilities:

• Use AI to flag and redact sensitive content across formats: AI-powered redaction tools automatically identify and remove sensitive data — such as PII, financial records, and legal identifiers — across a wide range of document types, dramatically reducing human error and accelerating the process.
• Apply consistent rule-based redactions for repeatable results: Automated systems use standardized rules and pattern recognition to ensure sensitive information is redacted consistently, supporting compliance with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and the FRCP.
• Log redaction actions to support audits and reviews: Advanced redaction software maintains detailed logs of every redaction, providing a complete audit trail that documents who redacted what and when, which is essential for defensibility and quality control.

‍Did you know? DISCO Ediscovery features a mass redactions capability, including customization of reasons and colors and multiple operations in one go. Learn more.

Internal collaboration

Ediscovery is a team effort. Legal teams collaborate with IT, HR, compliance, and outside counsel — often across time zones and tools — to gather, preserve, and interpret data from platforms like Slack, Zoom, and Teams. The volume and speed of this collaboration create new challenges that legacy tools weren’t built to handle.

To stay defensible and efficient, in-house teams need strategies that bring people, platforms, and processes into alignment.

Cross-departmental teams

Discovery moves faster when roles are clearly defined and communication is structured. Cross-functional alignment ensures everyone, from Legal to IT to compliance, knows what’s expected and how to execute.

To ensure cross-functional alignment, do the following:

• Identify key stakeholders early: Engage representatives from Legal, IT, HR, compliance, and relevant business units at the outset to ensure all perspectives and data sources are considered.
• Define responsibilities for each phase: Clearly assign roles for data collection, privilege review, and coordination to streamline workflows and reduce the risk of gaps or duplication.
• Create shared workflows and centralized access points: Develop standardized processes and use centralized platforms for collaboration to minimize miscommunication and avoid delays.
• Select tools that support independent and transparent work: Choose ediscovery solutions that empower legal teams to manage discovery independently, while providing full visibility and secure access for all relevant departments.

‍Did you know? DISCO helps in-house legal teams manage complex data, streamline workflows, and accelerate time to evidence — all while reducing risk and controlling costs. Learn more about DISCO for Corporations.

Collaboration platforms

Collaboration tools like Slack, Zoom, the Google Suite, and Teams are now central to business communication, and they introduce unique technical and data challenges for ediscovery. Unlike traditional email or documents, these platforms generate dynamic, high-volume, and multifaceted data, often stored in proprietary or semi-structured formats that complicate collection and review.

When dealing with ediscovery data from collaboration platforms, consider the following:

• Address complex data formats and structures: Collaboration data isn’t just text — it includes messages, threads, files, images, videos, emojis, and metadata, all organized differently across platforms. For example, Slack exports data as JSON, and Teams communications may span public channels, private chats, and threaded conversations, each with distinct retention and export rules.
• Understand retention and export limitations: Each platform offers different retention options and export features, often tied to subscription tiers. For instance, Slack’s Discovery API and Microsoft Teams’ ediscovery tools provide varying levels of access to messages, files, and metadata. Still, they may not capture private conversations or external content without additional permissions or technical steps. Aligning retention policies with your organization’s legal and compliance requirements is essential for defensibility.
• Integrate with ediscovery platforms for defensible collection: Choose ediscovery solutions that natively integrate with collaboration platforms to automate preservation, collection, and review of all relevant data. Direct integrations help maintain audit trails, automate legal holds, and ensure data is captured comprehensively and in a defensible manner — even as platforms evolve and new tools emerge.

Learn how to identify and preserve data from multiple collaborative sources — including best practices, technology, and our proven playbook — in this free webinar-on-demand.

Internal education programs

Everyone in the organization has a role to play in discovery, even if they’re not part of the legal team. Regular education programs build awareness, reduce missteps, and empower business units to respond quickly and appropriately.

Follow these steps to success for internal education programs:

• Provide regular training on discovery protocols: Offer ongoing education covering legal hold procedures, data handling, and ediscovery best practices to ensure all staff understand their responsibilities.
• Incorporate discovery readiness into onboarding and refreshers: Make discovery awareness part of new-hire onboarding and schedule quarterly or annual refresher courses to reinforce compliance and keep up with evolving requirements.
• Assign liaisons in key departments: Designate discovery coordinators or liaisons within business units, IT, and HR to facilitate communication, support role-specific upskilling, and act as points of contact for legal.

Track participation and compliance: Use your learning management system (LMS) or internal compliance tools to monitor training completion, identify gaps, and document readiness for audits or legal review.

Predefined escalation procedures

When something goes wrong or needs urgent attention, teams need a clear escalation path that’s fast, traceable, and tied to legal oversight.

Successful escalation paths for ediscovery depend on:

• Document roles and responsibilities: Clearly outline which team members — across legal, IT, compliance, and security — are responsible for handling specific types of issues at each stage of the discovery process.
• Establish service-level agreements (SLAs): Define response times and resolution targets for common issues, such as missed legal holds, data breaches, or production delays, to ensure timely and consistent action.
• Designate backups for critical roles: Assign alternate contacts for each escalation point to prevent bottlenecks during absences, vacations, or staff turnover, ensuring continuity and resilience.

Conduct tabletop exercises and simulations: Regularly test escalation procedures with scenario-based drills to identify gaps, improve coordination, and build team confidence under pressure.

Data identification and preservation

In ediscovery, what you don’t know — or can’t find — can hurt you. For corporate counsel, the risk isn’t just a missing file. It’s a missing audit trail, an overlooked custodian, or a gap in your preservation process that doesn’t hold up in court.

That’s why the most effective legal teams take control early by mapping where data lives and locking it down before the first subpoena arrives.

This process often includes data mapping and custodian interviews, aligning retention policies, conducting regular audits, and implementing automated legal hold systems to keep everything defensible and trackable at scale.

Data mapping and custodian interviews

You can’t preserve what you haven’t mapped. Start by identifying where data lives and who’s responsible for it. Mapping systems across departments and interviewing key custodians clarifies what’s in scope, what’s at risk, and how to secure it early in the process.

Follow these steps for successful data mapping and custodian interviews in corporate ediscovery:

• Create a detailed data map: Document structured data sources (e.g., databases, CRMs, financial systems) and unstructured sources (e.g., chat platforms, shared drives, collaboration tools like Slack or Teams). Include cloud storage, IoT devices, and legacy systems to ensure no critical repositories are overlooked.
• Conduct structured custodian interviews: Ask custodians targeted questions about their roles, data storage practices, and communication habits. For example:
  
  • Where do you store work-related files?
  • What tools do you use to communicate with colleagues or clients?
  • Do you use personal devices or external platforms for work?
  • You can find a sample custodian questionnaire in our guide, The Legal Hold Playbook.
• Standardize interview processes: Use consistent methods (conversational, formal, or survey-based) and documentation to ensure defensibility. Maintain logs of responses, data locations, and preservation actions.
• Identify gaps and dependencies: Cross-reference interview findings with IT records to uncover discrepancies, such as unauthorized cloud storage or unarchived communications, and address them proactively.

Additional reading: Slack Ediscovery: How to Collect Slack Data for Holds and Discovery

Retention policy integration

Well-designed retention policies help legal teams draw a defensible line between what gets preserved and what can be safely discarded. When aligned with ediscovery strategy, these policies reduce risk, eliminate ROT (redundant, obsolete, or trivial data), and simplify the scope of review.

To ensure the successful integration of your retention policy, follow these best practices:

• Align retention schedules with legal hold triggers and regulations: Ensure that retention periods are adjusted or suspended when a legal hold is issued, and that policies meet applicable regulatory and industry requirements (such as GDPR, HIPAA, or SEC rules).
• Coordinate with records management teams: Work closely with records managers to integrate ediscovery needs into broader information governance policies, ensuring that retention and deletion practices reflect current legal and business obligations.
• Document and communicate policy updates: Maintain clear records of policy changes and ensure all stakeholders are informed about updates, especially when litigation or investigations require deviations from standard retention schedules.

Regular audits

Even the best policies break down without oversight. Regular audits ensure compliance with legal holds, flag communication gaps, and document preservation efforts. They also give legal teams the evidence needed to defend process decisions if challenged.

Follow these best practices for information and process audits within your organization:

• Review hold compliance and documentation practices: Conduct scheduled audits to verify that legal holds are properly issued, acknowledged, and maintained and that all preservation actions are thoroughly documented.
• Track and resolve process gaps: Monitor for issues such as missed custodian acknowledgments, incomplete access controls, or lapses in audit logging. Address gaps promptly to strengthen defensibility and reduce risk.
• Document audit findings and corrective actions: Maintain detailed records of audit results and remediation steps taken, ensuring a clear trail for internal review or external scrutiny.

Automated legal hold systems

Automated legal hold systems give legal teams a scalable, efficient way to manage compliance across multiple matters and custodians. By streamlining notifications, tracking, and documentation, these tools reduce manual effort, minimize risk, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks, even when dozens of holds are active at once.

Look for the following capabilities in an automated legal hold system:

• Centralize and automate legal hold management: Use dedicated platforms like DISCO Hold to issue, monitor, and escalate legal holds across custodians and data systems. Automation ensures timely, consistent preservation actions and eliminates the bottlenecks of manual processes.
• Automate reminders and compliance tracking: Automated systems send reminders, track acknowledgments, and document every step while reducing time spent on follow-up and ensuring high rates of custodian compliance.
• Scale seamlessly as needs grow: Modern legal hold solutions are designed to handle growing data volumes, remote workforces, and complex organizational structures, so legal teams can adapt quickly without additional headcount or administrative burden.
• Integrate with enterprise systems: Direct connections with email, collaboration, and storage platforms ensure all relevant data is preserved and nothing is overlooked, supporting defensibility and audit readiness.

DISCO Hold automates the manual work necessary to comply with preservation requirements, empowering your legal team to preserve data, notify custodians, track holds with a defensible audit trail, and collect data when ready – all from a single interface.

Navigating compliance and regulations

Regulatory expectations are rising. Fast. From GDPR and HIPAA to SEC and FINRA, today’s compliance environment demands speed, accuracy, and defensibility. Today's compliance environment demands speed, precision, and defensible processes. Legal teams must manage investigations efficiently while maintaining clear documentation to support decision-making and demonstrate compliance.

Related reading: Get a handle on GDPR and CCPA compliance in Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs) in this article. 

That puts ediscovery at the heart of compliance: locating the right documents, demonstrating process control, preserving key information, and responding clearly when it matters most.

Here are some key strategies for navigating compliance and regulations:

Data localization policies

When investigations cross borders, compliance hinges on where data is stored — and where it stays. More than 100 countries now require personally identifiable information (PII) to remain within national boundaries, including China (PIPL), Russia (Federal Law No. 149-FZ), Brazil (LGPD), and the EU (GDPR). Overlooking these requirements can trigger fines, legal exposure, and operational delays.

Follow these best practices for data localization:

• Use air-gapped solutions or in-country infrastructure: Store sensitive data on-premises or within local cloud environments to comply with strict localization laws. Air-gapped systems (physically isolated from external networks) ensure data never crosses borders, mitigating risks of unauthorized access or regulatory penalties.
• Deploy resources for localized early case assessment: Conduct initial reviews using secure, offline tools to analyze data within jurisdictional boundaries, avoiding cross-border transfers until legally cleared.
• Enforce compliance boundaries with access controls: Restrict searches and data access based on user roles and geolocation to prevent accidental exposure or unauthorized transfers.

Related reading: mBERT: How Multilingual Predictive Tagging Powers Cross-Border Litigation

Audit trails and reporting

Regulators and courts expect transparency and verifiable compliance. Audit trails and comprehensive reporting provide ‌proof that data was preserved, holds were issued and acknowledged, and every action followed documented policy. 

These records are the backbone of defensible ediscovery, protecting organizations from legal and regulatory risk.

Follow these best practices for compliant audit trails and reporting:

• Log key events for accountability: Track who accessed, collected, searched, exported, or modified data, and when. Immutable audit trails create a tamper-proof record of all activity, supporting data integrity and regulatory requirements.
• Demonstrate compliance with on-demand reporting: With built-in reporting, you can document legal holds, preservation steps, and review processes, making it easier to respond to regulators or opposing counsel and prove that your process was sound.
• Maintain detailed search and activity logs: Retain search logs and activity records across all discovery tools. These logs document search parameters, user actions, and timing, ensuring transparency and enabling third parties to retrace every step if challenged.
• Document and explain exceptions: Record any deviations from standard procedures, such as missed holds or unique handling. Detailed exception logs further strengthen defensibility by showing good faith and providing context for your decisions.

Legal and compliance partnerships

No legal department operates in a vacuum. According to Bloomberg Law, a third of in-house legal teams outsource at least half of the ediscovery work, and nearly half of all in-house projects involve external partners. This trend highlights the central role of legal technology and service providers in modern discovery. With the right tools and relationships in place, legal departments can scale intelligently, review faster, and reduce risk. 

Ensure the success of your legal and compliance partnership by:

• Leverage AI-assisted tools: Accelerate initial review, language translation, and privilege analysis with advanced technology. AI-powered ediscovery solutions can quickly analyze large volumes of data, improving both speed and accuracy while reducing manual workload. DISCO’s Cecilia is a good example. It plugs into your existing workflows, making them more efficient and helping you build stronger cases.
• Utilize collaborative review platforms: Integrate securely with outside counsel and other stakeholders for seamless, real-time collaboration. Modern ediscovery platforms enable secure data sharing, coordinated workflows, and enhanced communication so all parties stay aligned and efficient.
• Ensure transparency and control: Maintain full visibility into review status, chain of custody, and custodial history without sacrificing efficiency. Comprehensive audit trails and reporting features support defensibility and compliance throughout the discovery process.

Regulatory intelligence tools

Generative AI and advanced analytics are now essential for managing compliance and regulatory risk in complex, fast-changing environments. These tools enable legal teams to stay ahead of evolving laws, proactively identify risks, and streamline compliance processes.

Look for the following in your regulatory intelligence tools:

• Automate compliance monitoring and reporting: Modern AI-driven compliance platforms continuously scan regulatory updates, automate mapping of laws and controls, and generate real-time alerts and reports. This reduces manual effort, minimizes errors, and keeps organizations audit-ready.
• Surface risk patterns and predict compliance breaches: Predictive analytics and machine learning analyze large, diverse datasets to detect anomalies, flag emerging risks, and forecast potential violations before they occur, enabling proactive risk mitigation and faster response to regulatory changes.
• Accelerate regulatory response with data classification: Automated, custodian-level classification frameworks preserve context and ensure that relevant data is quickly identified and produced for agency requests, supporting defensible and timely compliance.

New to generative AI? Get a quick breakdown of AI vs. GenAI, machine learning, and more. 

Developing and maintaining robust ediscovery policies

Corporate ediscovery requires comprehensive policies that go beyond Legal — they must be embedded across IT, compliance, and operational functions. That means multidisciplinary collaboration, risk assessment, training, and ongoing policy updates to keep pace with evolving data sources and legal requirements. 

Here are four strategies to help corporate legal teams build and maintain a robust ediscovery policy framework:

Alignment with ACC, EDRM, and CLOC

To build policies that hold up under legal and operational scrutiny, many legal departments turn to external frameworks for guidance. These models help teams stay consistent, defendable, and scalable, especially when policies span multiple business functions.

Three key models are:

• ACC (Association of Corporate Counsel): Ensures policies are defensible and meet legal expectations.
• EDRM (Electronic Discovery Reference Model): Offers a structured ediscovery framework to improve efficiency and consistency in processes.
• CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium): Ensures ediscovery policies support broader business objectives and streamline workflows.

Living documentation

Policies that keep pace with change are more effective and defensible. In today’s fast-evolving legal and regulatory landscape, treating your ediscovery policy as a living document ensures it remains relevant, actionable, and aligned with business priorities.

Keep the following in mind for your living documentation:

• Update policies proactively and regularly: Schedule periodic reviews — at least annually, or whenever there’s a major regulatory, technological, or organizational shift. Involve stakeholders from legal, IT, compliance, and business units to ensure policies reflect current risks, workflows, and data sources. Regular updates help prevent ad-hoc decision-making and keep your approach predictable and repeatable.
• Codify clear, practical procedures: Document step-by-step guidance for identification, preservation, collection, and review. Define roles, responsibilities, and escalation paths so team members know what’s expected at every stage. Include definitions of key terms, triggers for legal holds, and criteria for data retention and destruction.
• Leverage documentation as a training and onboarding tool: Use your living policy to support onboarding, ongoing education, and readiness drills. Clear, up-to-date instructions help new and existing staff understand their responsibilities and adapt to new tools or regulations. Annual training based on current policy reinforces compliance and process discipline.
• Embed continuous improvement: Encourage feedback from users and stakeholders and incorporate lessons learned from audits, litigation, or regulatory reviews. A living document isn’t just updated. It’s improved over time to reflect real-world challenges and outcomes.

Stakeholder buy-in

Stakeholder alignment turns policy into practice. When key leaders across the company are involved in shaping ediscovery policies, adoption is easier, compliance is stronger, and processes are more likely to withstand regulatory or judicial scrutiny.

To achieve stakeholder buy-in:

• Involve cross-functional stakeholders: Engage Legal, IT, compliance, and business units to ensure policies are practical, defensible, and tailored to real organizational needs.

Leverage executive sponsorship and steering committees: Secure leadership support to reinforce compliance priorities, overcome resistance to change, and allocate resources for training and technology.

Continuous training

Discovery processes are only as strong as the people carrying them out. Ongoing education helps teams understand their responsibilities, adapt to new technologies, and respond to legal events with confidence.

Follow these best practices for continuous training that supports your corporate ediscovery efforts:

• Educate employees on their ediscovery roles: Training ensures staff are up to date on data management, legal hold procedures, and compliance requirements, reducing the risk of errors or missed obligations.
• Facilitate technology adoption: Regular training accelerates the adoption of new technologies like predictive coding or AI-driven analytics, which can dramatically improve review efficiency and accuracy.
• Build organizational resilience: As regulations, case law, and technology evolve, continuous learning enables teams to stay ahead of industry trends and best practices, ensuring defensible and efficient discovery processes.

Cost control and defensible outcomes

Recent industry analyses confirm that, despite technological advances, review still commands the largest share of ediscovery spending — about 65% of total ediscovery expenditures as of 2023 — and is projected to remain the single largest cost driver in the years ahead.

Technology is gradually shifting these cost allocations. Since 2012, review’s share of total ediscovery costs has dropped from 73% to 64%, while collection costs have doubled from 8% to 16% and processing costs have risen from 19% to 20%. This shift reflects the increasing complexity and diversity of data sources, as well as the need for more advanced tools to handle modern data environments.

To remain efficient and defensible, corporate counsel must rethink where time and money are spent, invest in scalable tools, and build workflows that reduce waste without sacrificing accuracy.

Let’s look at some strategies for controlling costs and ensuring defensible outcomes.

Defensible workflows

Defensibility starts with documentation and consistency. For workflows to hold up in court, they must be easily explained, repeatable, and supported by clear records. This means building systematic, transparent procedures and using targeted, defensible strategies at every stage.

Maintain defensibility by following these best practices:

• Uphold systematic and transparent procedures: Maintain clear, well-documented processes for data collection, processing, and review. Documentation ensures your approach can be explained and defended if challenged.
• Ensure consistency across matters and geographies: Implement standardized workflows to meet legal and regulatory requirements in every jurisdiction, optimizing efficiency and reducing risk.

Use targeted collections and defensible search-at-source: Focus on collecting only what is necessary, using defensible search terms and criteria to minimize data volumes and costs.

Budget forecasting

Effective forecasting enables legal teams to allocate resources wisely, justify spend, and avoid cost overruns. 

Ensure accurate budget forecasting by doing the following:

• Predict costs using historical data and analytics: Analyze past matters and leverage analytics tools to forecast ediscovery expenses and allocate resources more efficiently.
• Implement cost recovery and reporting dashboards: Track spending trends and optimize budgets for future cases with real-time reporting and transparent cost models.
• Adopt managed services with predictable billing: Use managed service providers that offer fixed or subscription-based pricing to stabilize costs and improve financial planning.

Identify relevant information up to 60% faster with DISCO Review, the managed review service run by our in-house experts.

Outsource partnerships

Strategic outsourcing helps legal teams manage high volumes of discovery without overwhelming internal resources. It allows in-house counsel to stay focused on legal strategy while trusted partners handle processing, review, and compliance at scale. 

According to the ACC Legal Transformation Report, only 40% of departments manage ediscovery entirely in-house, while 60% rely on ediscovery partners or a hybrid model. This trend is echoed globally: the legal process outsourcing (LPO) market is projected to reach $23.6 billion in 2025, with ediscovery among the fastest-growing outsourced legal services.

A good example is DISCO’s end-to-end ediscovery service, which gives legal teams a strategic, on-demand partner that brings customized support and proactive solutions from a deep bench of world-class experts.

To get the most out of outside partnerships, do the following:

• Access specialized expertise and scalable support: Outsourcing to experienced partners provides immediate access to skilled professionals and proven workflows, allowing organizations to efficiently ramp up or down based on matter size and complexity without hiring or training additional staff.
• Tailor solutions to fit your needs: Providers offer flexible service models, from full outsourcing to hybrid approaches that supplement internal capabilities. This flexibility helps legal teams control costs, maintain oversight, and adapt to changing workloads.
• Enhance operational efficiency and risk management: External partners bring established best practices for defensibility, quality control, and compliance, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring matters are handled consistently, even during surges or unexpected events.
• Leverage advanced technology as a value-add: Leading providers like DISCO incorporate state-of-the-art tools for data collection, processing, and analytics — delivering efficiency and accuracy as part of a comprehensive service offering.

Leverage technology-driven tools 

Corporate legal departments report significant benefits from adopting technology-driven tools, including increased efficiency (48%), cost savings (36%), improved data management and security (28%), and risk mitigation (28%). Notably, 13% say technology gives them a higher chance of better litigation outcomes.

Tech tools can yield the following benefits for corporate ediscovery:

• Accelerate review with technology-assisted review (TAR) and AI analytics:
  TAR and predictive coding use machine learning to rapidly identify and prioritize relevant documents, reducing manual review time and cutting review costs, which typically make up the largest share of ediscovery spend. AI-powered review with a tool like Auto Review also improves accuracy and consistency, helping legal teams surface key evidence faster.
• Streamline data processing with advanced search, deduplication, and analytics:
  Tools like deduplication and conceptual search minimize the data set by eliminating duplicates and surfacing unique, relevant content. This not only saves time and storage costs but also reduces the risk of missing critical information in large data volumes.
• Scale efficiently with cloud-based ediscovery solutions: Cloud platforms offer on-demand scalability, secure storage, and predictable costs, so legal teams can handle matters of any size without investing in expensive on-premises infrastructure. Cloud solutions also support remote collaboration and rapid deployment for global teams.

Need help using generative AI for document review? Check out our guide here.

Key takeaways for corporate ediscovery

A well-planned strategy is essential to navigating the complexity of ediscovery for corporate counsel. The key is to start with the right building blocks, align your internal teams, and take one step at a time. In this space, progress is more about consistency than perfection.

Focus on these essentials:

• Use data mapping and automation to streamline discovery and reduce manual effort.
• Build processes that hold up under scrutiny to ensure defensibility and efficiency.
• Align legal, IT, and compliance to minimize delays and ensure seamless collaboration.
• Leverage AI tools to reduce review volume, cut costs, and surface what matters most.

Partnering with an expert ediscovery technology and services provider like DISCO gives corporate legal teams the support they need to operate at scale while reducing costs, improving accuracy, and minimizing risk. With the right partner, you can focus on practicing law and delivering better outcomes, even under pressure.

Choosing the best corporate ediscovery software

As ediscovery for corporate counsel evolves, a proactive, tech-enabled approach will help your team stay ahead of risk and deliver strategic value to your organization.

DISCO’s award-winning corporate ediscovery software and end-to-end ediscovery services are designed to help you tackle your most complex matters. 

Our cutting-edge cloud architecture and market-leading generative AI help you ‌find the evidence you need and accelerate your case strategy.

You can count on DISCO’s ediscovery for corporations as your trusted partner, whether your needs are legal hold and data collection, internal investigations, government investigations and litigation, or large-scale document review.

Check out DISCO’s ediscovery product overview to learn how we can help you do more with less, using applied analytics and AI, better case assessment, powerful self-service, and optimized cost and performance.

Curious to see what we can do for you? 

Schedule a demo