# How do you manage an eDiscovery workflow?

> Managing an eDiscovery workflow means running each stage - identification, collection, processing, review, and production - as a tracked, repeatable process with clear ownership, defined coding rules, and a record of what was done at each step.

Managing an eDiscovery workflow is mostly about making a sequence of handoffs visible and repeatable. The stages themselves are well established - the EDRM reference model breaks them into identification, preservation, collection, processing, review and analysis, and production - and most trouble comes from the gaps between stages rather than the stages themselves.

**Practical ways teams keep it under control**

-   **Work backwards from the production deadline.** Set target dates for collection complete, processing complete, and review complete, then track against them weekly.
-   **Keep one authoritative scope record.** Custodians, date ranges, sources, and search terms change during a matter. If that lives in email threads, nobody knows the current scope.
-   **Document culling decisions as you make them.** Deduplication, date and domain filters, and search term choices are all questions you may have to answer later.
-   **Write the coding manual before review starts,** and keep the issue codes few enough that reviewers apply them consistently.
-   **Build QC in rather than bolting it on at the end.** Sampling batches during review catches a misunderstood code in the first thousand documents instead of the last.
-   **Log handoffs.** Who loaded which volume, when, and what the document counts were before and after.

Automation earns its place at the points with the highest manual overhead: prioritising what gets looked at first, collapsing near-duplicates and email threads, and running a consistent first pass so lawyers spend their time on the documents that actually matter.

Related reading: the [Ultimate AI-Powered eDiscovery Workflow Automation Guide](/stories/ultimate-ai-powered-ediscovery-workflow-automation-guide) goes deeper on automating these steps.

Claira is an AI eDiscovery platform for document review at scale - you can [book a demo](/demos) to see where it fits in a workflow like this.