Rule 26(f) Conferences, Rehearsed
The discovery conference sets the cost of the entire case. Walking in without knowing your own data landscape is how budgets get set by the other side.
By eDiscovery Desk, Louflin Law
eDiscovery
Louflin Law · eDiscovery Desk
By the time parties meet and confer, the expensive decisions are being made: sources, formats, date ranges, search methodology, and who bears the cost of what. A party that hasn't mapped its own data arrives ready to agree to terms it cannot estimate.
Know your own volumes first
Before the conference, you want defensible numbers for the sources in play: how many custodians, how much volume per system, what the collection actually costs, and where deduplication and threading will help. Those figures turn proportionality from a posture into an argument.
- Custodian count and the systems each one touches.
- Estimated volume per source, with the method used to estimate it.
- Known gaps — decommissioned systems, departed custodians, unrecoverable devices.
- Your position on search terms versus analytics, with a reason attached.
Agree on format like it matters
Production format disputes are cheap to prevent and expensive to relitigate. Settle on load file specification, metadata fields, native handling, and privilege log format in writing at the conference — not in a letter three months later when a vendor has already processed the first tranche.
Proportionality is only persuasive when you can price the alternative.
Rehearsing the conference — literally, with the team, against the numbers — is a modest investment against a discovery budget that can otherwise be set by whichever party did the homework.
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