by: Rachel Fernandez, Director of Sales Engineering
Litigation can move quickly, and eDiscovery is often treated as a reactionary requirement rather than a proactive strategy. Forensics, collections, hosting, document review, and production can all feel daunting when priorities are stacking up. But setting a realistic scope at the outset of your matter is one of the most valuable investments you can make. It keeps you within budget, positions you defensibly, and gives you better control over the direction of your case from day one.
Early case assessment is time consuming, but it provides the best opportunity to set realistic budgets and timelines while ensuring continuity and defensibility throughout the lifecycle of your matter. A poorly scoped matter inflates collection volumes, complicates your approach, and increases legal spend across the board.
Custodian Identification
The investigative phase can provide invaluable insight into the scope of your matter. Starting with a strong custodian interview process helps answer the most important questions about your potential data population before anything is collected.
When conducting custodian interviews, organizing your questions into clear categories keeps the process efficient and ensures nothing falls through the cracks.
- Data Sources, Locations and Access. Ask custodians how they store their data, whether they use personal devices for work communications, and whether any data is archived offline. Cross-reference what you learn against your client’s information governance policy and note any deviations. Collaborate with your client’s IT team early to confirm access and credentials, and track all data sources with the relevant dates they were in use.
- Communication Habits. Ask custodians who they were in contact with throughout the relevant period and what methods and technologies they used. Pay particular attention to collaboration tools like Teams, Slack, or other platforms that may not be obvious collection targets but often contain substantive communications.
- Document Creation and Handling. Understand how custodians draft and store their work. Do they work directly in cloud-based applications, or do they draft locally before moving files to a shared system? Are there any third-party tools used to annotate, edit, or sign documents that may hold relevant versions?
- Retention and Deletion. Ask how custodians manage their data over time. Do they regularly delete emails, or do they archive them? Discuss their awareness of any prior legal hold obligations and whether any devices have been replaced, wiped, or upgraded during the relevant period.
- Matter Specifics. Use this portion of the interview to focus on the custodian’s direct involvement in the matter. Ask about who else may have visibility into the relevant events and use those answers to continue building out your custodian list. Do not hesitate to ask about specific documents or communications that may be central to the matter.
Pattern Recognition and Data Source Mapping
Once you have a solid foundation from your custodial interviews, you can begin identifying patterns across your potential data population. Look for the most active custodians, note any anomalies that deviate from your client’s information governance policy, and flag shared mailboxes or issues with how metadata may be stored across systems.
This information feeds directly into your data source map. The eDiscovery process has evolved well beyond email. Data lives in collaboration tools, on personal devices, in proprietary business systems, and across cloud platforms. Companies often have information governance policies in place, but the reality of where data actually lives frequently diverges from those policies. Mapping your sources thoroughly before collection ensures you are not surprised later in the process.
A Multi-Layered Approach to Culling
Once your data sources are mapped, the next step is narrowing down to the most useful population for review. Culling is not about finding reasons to exclude documents. It is about making deliberate, documented decisions that best represent your case and can be explained and defended if scrutinized.
Date filtering, search term analysis, and domain analysis can all be layered together to build a population that captures relevant information without over-collecting.
- Date Filtering. A wide date range is not always the most practical approach, particularly when cost is a significant consideration. Your custodian interviews should help define the periods where relevant data was most likely created or modified. When applying date ranges, look beyond primary creation dates. A document may have been created outside the relevant period but modified frequently within it. Recurring documents like contracts and policies often fall into this category, where version history is more meaningful than the original creation date.
- Search Term Culling. Search terms remain the most common method for culling data, and the process works best when treated as iterative rather than a single exercise. Run hit reports before finalizing any terms and revisit the list as you learn more about the data. Use proximity operators to add precision to terms that are returning disproportionately large volumes. Account for common misspellings, industry shorthand, abbreviations, and informal names that custodians may have used in practice. Track every iteration and change to your term list carefully. If the court or opposing counsel scrutinizes your process, a clear record of how your terms evolved and what results they produced will be essential to explaining your methodology.
- Domain Analysis. Domain analysis is one of the most underutilized tools in the culling process. By examining the sender and recipient email domains across your dataset, you get a broad view of the communication landscape before review begins. This allows you to quickly identify and exclude low-relevance domains such as automated ticketing systems and mass marketing emails, while prioritizing domains that signal relevance, such as opposing counsel, key third-party vendors, and other involved parties. Domain analysis also has a secondary benefit: it frequently surfaces unexpected communication channels between parties that were not disclosed during custodial interviews, which can be an important signal in itself.
Starting your eDiscovery matter with a deliberate scoping strategy gives you better control over your data, your legal spend, and your overall approach. The time invested at the front end consistently pays off in a more focused, defensible, and cost-effective review. Partnering with experienced eDiscovery professionals, like the team at Sandline, allows you to augment your capabilities and ensure your process holds up at every stage.