Extract from Cat Casey’s article “The EDRM Smoothie: A Delicious Ultimate eDiscovery Primer”
What happens when a sales manager, a sparkly legal tech nerd, and a blender walk into a room? (No, not a dad joke.) You get a metaphor so tasty, even the newest member of the eDiscovery tribe wants to take a sip.
The eDiscovery Reference Model—EDRM, you know it, you love it, you sometimes loathe it. The model is a perfect breakdown of the eDiscovery process, maybe a little too perfect. It gives off serious “flowchart for grownups” energy—like eDiscovery just gracefully pirouettes from Identification to Production without tripping over its own metadata.
But anyone who’s tangoed with terabytes IRL knows better. eDiscovery’s less Rockettes-at-Radio-City and more rogue conga line in a server room—chaotic, glitchy, and no one’s sure who’s leading. That’s not the EDRM’s fault—it’s reality, doing its messy little dance. And that’s why teaching folks about discovery—or the EDRM itself—can feel like trying to nail jelly to a whiteboard with a noodle.
So, when my colleague Ian Lowe casually dropped that he teaches our newest sales reps about discovery by explaining the EDRM like it’s a smoothie, this Technocat’s ears perked right up. The Smoothie metaphor is the discovery decoder ring we didn’t know we needed. And it works, for anyone from fresh hires, salty veterans, and that one partner still pretending not to use ChatGPT to look up “processing, ELI5” on your 5th matter together.
Ready to hit purée with me on the EDRM Smoothie?
