In eDiscovery, project management hinges on a single, critical tenet: aligning stakeholders and defining their expectations early. While traditional projects often allow for prolonged planning, eDiscovery matters typically hit the ground running with almost no advance warning. To achieve Smarter Workflows and avoid the chaos of "random acts of eDiscovery," as described in our first article in this series exploring our new eDiscovery playbook template, your organization must understand its roles and roster well before a preservation trigger occurs.

Want to learn how experts think about building an eDiscovery playbook? Listen to our on-demand webinar, The Modern eDiscovery Playbook: A Blueprint for You.

Determining Who Fills the Roles

Building a roster is not always about hiring new personnel; it is about mapping existing expertise to specific discovery functions. Many organizations do not have the luxury of a 1:1 ratio between people and roles. For example, in smaller teams, the Head of Litigation Support may also serve as the Discovery Manager for every matter.

To determine who should fill these roles, legal leaders should perform a cross-functional audit:

1. Assess Technical Access: Who already holds administrative rights to your most sensitive data repositories?
2. Evaluate Strategic Authority: Who has the legal standing to define "relevance" and "proportionality" during high-stakes negotiations?
3. Identify Orchestrators: Who possesses the project management skills to coordinate between disparate departments like HR, IT, and external counsel?

The Strategic Core

This group provides the leadership and oversight necessary to ensure every matter is handled with decision confidence.

• Head of Litigation Support: This individual oversees the technical execution of the discovery process. Their primary focus is on cost predictability, process automation, and ensuring the defensibility of every action taken within the platform.
• In-House Counsel: They provide the strategic lens for the matter. This role is responsible for making key strategy decisions and setting the scope for what data is truly "relevant" to the case.
• Discovery Manager: Acting as the central orchestrator, this person is responsible for the end-to-end matter lifecycle. They coordinate across all departments—IT, HR, and Legal—for specific projects.
• Legal Operations: This role oversees workflows and manages the legal spend and budget. In many organizations, an experienced discovery coordinator may transition into this broader operational oversight role.

Technical & Execution Experts

Smarter outcomes depend on the precision of those handling the data and the legal strategy.

• IT Department & Data Stewards: These experts manage the organization's technical infrastructure. They are responsible for the security and integrity of enterprise data, ensuring that preservation doesn't interfere with daily business operations.
• NCDS Owners (Non-Custodial Data Source Owners): These are the critical points of contact for enterprise systems that possess data outside individual user control—such as SharePoint, Slack, Teams, or proprietary databases.
• Digital Forensic Investigator: By performing AI-assisted triage, these investigators cut through data overload to find evidence faster. They are responsible for maintaining a strict chain-of-custody across endpoint, cloud, and mobile sources.
• Lead Case Counsel (Internal or External): This role holds final authority on legal strategy and handles high-stakes Rule 26(f) "meet and confer" negotiations.
• Custodians & Case Paralegals: While custodians are responsible for complying with preservation mandates, case paralegals manage the tactical daily steps, including tracking custodian responses and documenting the process for the audit log.

Mapping Your Enterprise Systems

A key part of your playbook should be a pre-defined map of your Non-Custodial Data Sources (NCDS). Without knowing who owns these systems, your team will face significant handoff gaps during a collection.

While mapping Non-Custodial Data Sources (NCDS) is essential, teams often encounter several hurdles:

• Data Diversity and Volume: The explosion of messaging apps, collaboration suites like Slack and Teams, and AI-generated content has outpaced traditional discovery workflows.
• Technical Complexity: Modern systems often store ephemeral data, encrypted messages, and fragmented chat threads, making a simple search technically difficult.
• Communication Breakdowns: Disconnected definitions between Legal, IT, and Privacy teams regarding "collection" or "risk" can derail mapping efforts.
• "Unknown" Data Exposure: Risk often lives in stale repositories, rogue SaaS tools, or shadow IT that the organization doesn't even realize it has.

To build an evergreen and accurate data map, a cross-functional approach is required:

• IT and InfoSec: These stakeholders typically own the budget and provide the technical access to data repositories.
• Privacy and Compliance Officers: They ensure the map accounts for regulatory obligations like GDPR/CCPA and helps trigger necessary assessments (DPIAs/TIAs).
• Data Stewards: As primary contacts for specific systems (e.g., SharePoint or HRIS), they are responsible for suspending deletion rules when a preservation plan is active.
• Legal Operations: They bridge the gap between departments, managing the end-to-end workflow and the legal spend associated with discovery.

Next Steps in the Smarter Matters Series:

Once your team is identified, you must define the trigger that brings them together. Join us next week for a new article, where we provide information to help you identify preservation triggers before risk compounds.

Download the full Guide to Creating a Smarter eDiscovery Playbook to access all the assets associated with developing your own playbook.

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