What is an eDiscovery lawyer?

An eDiscovery lawyer is a lawyer whose practice centres on the discovery of electronically stored information. The title covers a range of roles - some sit inside litigation teams at firms, some work in-house, and some work at service providers or as independent consultants.

The work typically includes:

Preservation and legal holds. Identifying custodians and data sources, issuing hold notices, and making sure relevant material is not lost or overwritten.

Scoping and negotiation. Agreeing search terms, date ranges, custodian lists, and production formats with opposing counsel, and handling disputes about proportionality.

Review supervision. Defining responsiveness and privilege criteria, structuring the review, and running quality control over coding decisions.

Production and defensibility. Overseeing redactions, privilege logs, and production specifications, and being able to explain the process if it is challenged.

The role sits between law, project management, and technology. A good eDiscovery lawyer needs to understand the substantive legal test being applied and enough about the tooling to know what the platform is actually doing to the data.

That technical side is changing quickly. As AI-assisted review takes on more of the first-pass reading, the value of the role shifts further toward defining the criteria, supervising quality, and defending the process - rather than the sheer volume of documents personally reviewed.

Related reading: How the job of an eDiscovery lawyer will evolve due to AI in the next 5 years.

To see how AI-assisted review changes the workload, book a Claira demo.