Extract from Casey Sullivan’s article “Best Practices for Preparing, Conducting, and Using Depositions”
In ediscovery, we spend a lot of our time discussing phases of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, or EDRM. There are companies and solutions focused on the “left side” of the EDRM (identification, preservation, and collection), other companies and solutions focused on the “right side” of the EDRM (analysis, processing, review, and production), and still other companies and solutions offering end-to-end ediscovery. However, for many of those end-to-end providers, the right “end” stops at production.
Perhaps the phase that gets discussed the least by ediscovery professionals is the one that drives what happens in all others: the presentation phase.
Every other ediscovery phase, from identification through production, should be conducted with presentation in mind. To present evidence as exhibits in a deposition, trial, or other presentation event, that evidence must first be identified, preserved, collected, analyzed, processed, reviewed, and produced.
Depositions are a vital part of the discovery process. They are used to generate evidence for the ultimate presentation event – trial – but they are also presentation events themselves, in that evidence, whether physical evidence or electronically stored information (ESI), is often presented during the process of deposing the witness.
