The EDRM Smoothie: A Delicious Ultimate eDiscovery Primer

‍By Cat Casey, featuring the brilliance of Ian Lowe

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?

The Birth of the EDRM Smoothie

The EDRM has been gracing PowerPoint slides since 2005. Guiding professionals through the eDiscovery lifecycle—from Identification to Presentation. It’s a solid tool for explaining a messy reality, but the model can feel more aspirational than authentic.  

I’ve sat through or presented hundreds of eDiscovery 101s and EDRM CLEs in the last 20 years, and honestly? Even I get bored with the pretend perfection glossing over a messy, nuanced reality. So, when Ian said, “Let’s make this about smoothies,” I was all-in!

Why?  

You don’t need a law degree, a computer science PhD, and a minor in forensic sociology to thrive in eDiscovery. You need a framework that’s flexible enough to teach, repeatable enough to scale, and cheeky enough to stick.

A smoothie is universal.

Everyone understands the joy (and chaos) of tossing a bunch of ingredients into a blender and hoping it turns out delicious (or at least non-toxic). That’s discovery. You’re handed stale data, questionable instructions, and a last-minute deadline—then expected to serve it in court, ideally with polish. And best of all? You don’t need twenty years of case law or to quote Rule 26(f) in your sleep to grasp the difference between a subpoena and a strawberry.

So, what makes up this mythical EDRM Smoothie?  

Information Governance: Know Your Freezer Before You Blend

Every smoothie starts with a fridge check. What do you actually have? What’s expired? What did your teenager label “DO NOT EAT” and shove behind the oat milk?

That’s Information Governance.

It’s the part no one brags about, but it sets the tone for everything else. If your ingredients (read: data) aren’t labeled, stored, or even findable, your smoothie’s doomed before the blender lids even on.

“If people already had better organization—or even just a better view of where their data was—the whole process would be so much smoother.” – Ian Lowe

And smooth is the goal, right?

But here’s the reality: most orgs don’t know they’re hoarding mangoes—let alone if they’re moldy, duplicated, or hiding inside someone’s Slack DMs. That’s where governance comes in. Data mapping, lifecycle policies, naming conventions, retention schedules—all the unsexy scaffolding that makes fast, defensible discovery possible.

If your kitchen’s a disaster and your “fresh” spinach expired two fiscal years ago, you’re not making a smoothie—you’re begging for food poisoning… or sanctions.

Identification: Read the Smoothie Order Carefully

The counter bell dings. An order comes flying in—banana-strawberry-oat, hold the peanut butter. Now what?

You don’t run out and grab every piece of fruit in the tri-state area. You pause. You scope. You figure out what’s needed to make that smoothie. That’s Identification.

In eDiscovery, this is the split-second after the panic trigger—lawsuit filed, subpoena dropped, or some poor soul in finance fat-fingers an entire inbox into the wild. The urge to hit “collect all the things” is real. But smart teams breathe first and figure out the who, what, where, and when before they start scooping data.

Skip that? And you’re dumping chat threads, file shares, and four years of HR emails into the blender and calling it strategy. Spoiler: it’s not.

“Imagine you're at Jamba Juice, and an order comes in for a banana strawberry smoothie. The identification stage is figuring out exactly what you’ll need—bananas, strawberries, milk, maybe ice or protein powder—based on that order. If you just said, ‘make me a smoothie’ and didn’t say what fruit you want… Ian is going to go get every fruit. Did he even have a car? We don’t know.” – Ian Lowe

Identification is your smoothie blueprint. Get it right, and everything downstream blends a whole lot better—with fewer surprises, fewer sanctions, and far fewer rotten mangoes.

Detour → Retention: When the Bananas Expire Before You Even Start

Let’s say you do read the smoothie order carefully. You scope your custodians, lock in the timeframes, and figure out exactly what data belongs in the blender.

Too bad the bananas are already gone…And that’s why understanding retention matters.

Even the best scoping won’t save you if the data’s already been purged. Not because someone’s hiding the fruit—but because automated retention policies move faster than legal holds. IT sets them. Legal often doesn’t even know they exist.

“At this Jamba Juice, bananas expire in two days. That’s our food retention policy. If you didn’t check the fridge, your banana’s gone.” – Ian Lowe

Think Teams messages disappearing after seven days and chat logs ghosting themselves while Legal is still debating whether this even triggers a hold. That’s how teams end up chasing ghosts, trying to reconstruct a record that no longer exists. It’s not sabotage—it’s just the settings.

The kicker? You might not notice until the blender’s already spinning and you’re blending air.

Preservation: Hands Off the Mangoes

Once you know what matters, the next move is making sure no one eats it, deletes it, or accidentally turns it into a Slack emoji reaction. That’s preservation.

It’s not “save everything.” It’s “don’t touch that.”

Think of it like slapping a DO NOT EAT sticky note on the mango you need for tomorrow’s smoothie. Doesn’t matter if someone’s hungry—it’s staying in the fridge.

“You don’t want to wait until something goes into court to figure out, ‘Oh, well, maybe I shouldn’t have deleted that.’” – Ian Lowe

Preservation is your fridge lock. It’s not just sending a legal hold and calling it a day—it’s making sure people actually read it, get it, and don’t “accidentally” clean out the folder marked Important Stuff Do Not Delete.

This is where teams get sloppy. They treat preservation like a one-time blast when it’s really an ongoing job. Because “oops” isn’t a defense when your mango’s missing and the judge is thirsty.

Collection: Grocery Run, Minus the Kitchen Sink

You’ve picked the smoothie. You’ve scoped the fridge. Now someone has to go get the goods—without coming back with a watermelon and a bag of frozen peas.

That’s collection in the wild: too many cooks, zero recipes, and a mystery pantry no one’s labeled in five years. Legal gets a SharePoint dump called Final-Final-V2-For-Real-This-Time and pretends that’s normal. It’s not. It’s chaos in a zip file.

And let’s be clear—it’s not about hauling in every mango in the tri-state area, 75 pineapples, and a kitchen sink. It’s about grabbing the right stuff, in the right amounts, so the final product doesn’t taste like a sanctions motion in smoothie form.

Without coordination, collection becomes guesswork—over-collecting irrelevant junk, missing the stuff that actually matters, or blowing your chain of custody in the process. And all because no one paused to ask: who’s going to the store, what are they grabbing, and do they even know what aisle the mangoes are in?

“Check the fridge and see what’s still good—if the bananas are bad, someone needs to run out and collect fresh ones. Same with data: collect what’s missing after you’ve checked what’s already preserved. And each step might be a different human: Cat picks the smoothie. Ian checks the fridge—but it’s not even his fridge. Then George heads to the store… but does George even have his own list? That’s the chaos of ID, preservation, and collection when roles and communication aren’t aligned.” — Ian Lowe

“It’s so easy for Cat to say, ‘I want a smoothie, let me check my fridge.’ But in a company, that’s five different people—and none of them share a kitchen. Cat picks the smoothie. Ian checks the fridge—but it’s not even his fridge. Then George runs to the store to collect what’s missing… but does George even have his own list? If the instructions are vague—just ‘a fruit smoothie’—you end up with chaos, wasted time, wasted money, and way too many groceries runs. That’s the chaos of ID, preservation, and collection when roles and communication aren’t aligned.”

Smart teams use tools like Reveal’s that grab what matters (Slack, Zoom, email, the whole fruit basket), skips what doesn’t, and keeps the chain of custody tighter than TSA on a smoothie bomb.

Get the list. Get aligned. Then collect like someone actually plans to drink the smoothie.

Processing: Pulse, Don’t Pulverize

This is the moment where things go from chaos to coherence—or catastrophe. You’ve collected the fruit. Congrats. But now comes the step that separates a smoothie from a sludge bucket. Processing isn’t just mashing data through a blender—it’s transforming raw, mismatched, sometimes-questionably-labeled ingredients into something smooth, searchable, and legally sound.

You don’t toss in a mango pit, a banana peel, and someone’s entire Outlook folder labeled “personal-ish” and expect it to come out palatable. This is where you filter the seeds, deNIST the spam, dedupe the repeats, and skim the surface junk so what’s left is digestible—and defensible.

This is where a lot of teams go full toddler-in-a-kitchen. They hit “liquefy” without even glancing at the settings. Suddenly you’ve gotten versions of the same doc, someone’s vacation selfies, and the HR file no one was supposed to collect—but here we are.

“A banana, strawberry, and milk are all different objects, and we need to process them into the same readable, drinkable format. That’s what the blender does—just like processing in eDiscovery turns different file types into one standard format. If you skip this step, it’s not a smoothie. It’s fruit soup. Possibly with a side of food poisoning.” – Ian Lowe

Review: Taste, Adjust, Repeat

You’ve chopped, blended, filtered—and now it’s time to taste. This is the moment of truth. Is the flavor balanced? Did something funky sneak in? Is it smooth, or are you crunching down on a rogue chia seed that definitely wasn’t on the ingredients list?

Review is where the human palate meets machine precision. AI can flag what’s off, speed up the first pass, and highlight the “uh-oh” zones—but it’s still on the human reviewer to decide if this smoothie is court-ready or headed straight back to the mix station.

You’re not just sipping to admire your own work. You’re looking for anomalies—did a doc sneak in that scream “privileged”? Did the tone shift halfway through that email thread? Is there a metaphorical walnut in a peanut-free workspace?

“You dip your finger in and taste—too runny, too sweet, too banana-y. That’s anomaly detection. You expected strawberry, and you got chaos.” – Ian Lowe

And chaos in review? That’s where things go sideways. Sanctions. Spoliation. Or that headline you never wanted to read in Law.com. That’s why good review tech doesn’t just accelerate—it empowers. Reveal’s GenAI-powered review layers smart search with quality control and learns from every click, tag, and eyeroll. It’s AI with a palate. But the human’s still the head chef.

Because the worst-case scenario isn’t a weird-tasting smoothie. It’s AI declaring “all good” while privileged docs do the Macarena into opposing counsel’s hands.

Analysis: What’s Actually in This Thing?

You’ve blended. You’ve tasted. It’s smooth enough to serve without blushing. But now the client’s asking questions. What’s actually in this thing? Macros? Added sugars? Did someone sneak in a peanut butter packet without checking for allergies?

Welcome to analysis: where flavor gives way to forensics.

This isn’t about whether it tastes good—it’s about what it’s made of. You’re not just sipping; you’re scanning for anomalies, spikes, and suspicious communication bursts that don’t show up on a first pass. Why is there a flurry of emails between accounting and procurement every Thursday at 3pm? Why are three employees using encrypted chat to talk about “Project Sunshine” and only “Project Sunshine”?

This is where Reveal + Brainspace step in—not as passive dashboards, but as your data sommelier and forensic food scientist rolled into one. They’re not just slicing through the pulp; they’re surfacing the timelines, clusters, language shifts, and hidden signals that transform a nice blend into a case-winning narrative.

“When the client came in, they wanted a banana smoothie on the menu… is it at the calories of our listed for this smoothie… is it under the sugar count that we’re claiming that it is?” – Ian Lowe

And that moment—the one where you catch the poisoned cherry before anyone else even saw the sundae—that’s the power move. That’s the part where discovery stops being reactive and starts becoming strategic. Where you’re not just answering questions, you’re anticipating the next ones.

Because in the end, analysis is how you move from “looks fine” to “found it”—before they do.

Production: Bottled, Branded, and Courtroom-Ready

You’ve blended the data. It’s smooth, consistent, and shockingly palatable. But now it needs to be bottled—cleanly, clearly, and in the exact 16 oz format opposing counsel ordered. With a label, a lid, and not a drop out of place. Because this is production—and it’s where your smoothie either makes it to court or gets tossed for bad packaging.

Production is the logistics engine of eDiscovery. The unsung hero. The quiet powerhouse. This is where metadata gets validated, audit trails get logged, and Bates numbers march into place like tiny, redacted soldiers. It’s less about flavor now and more about form. And yes, you’re still under pressure—only now it’s about making sure the cherry lands on the right cup, not whether it’s sweet enough.

"You turn off the blender, pour it into a bottle, slap the right label on it, and Slack the person’s name. That’s production." — Ian Lowe

But don’t be fooled—this part is anything but basic. You’re formatting to spec, sealing chain of custody, and aligning every byte to hold up in court. And if your client asks for it with whipped cream, cherry, and no plastic? That’s not flair—it’s a production request. You’re not just sending files. You’re serving up admissibility in a branded carrier tray with a side of court-ready polish.

Because if you skip a field, screw up redactions, or forget to QA that metadata, the only thing getting delivered is your credibility... to the opposing side. And they will sip that mistake with glee.

Presentation: Serving With Style

Now cue the lights—this is your smoothie’s big debut. The courtroom. The spotlight. The moment your carefully crafted evidence gets judged not just on substance, but on style. Because Presentation isn’t just garnish—it’s theater. And in legal, theater matters.

You’ve done the heavy lifting. You identified, collected, processed, reviewed, analyzed, and produced. Now it all needs to land. With precision. With persuasion. With whipped cream and the tiniest trial graphic umbrella you can find.

““You don’t make a smoothie to store it in the blender—you pour it out and serve it. That’s the whole point. The whipped cream and cherry? That’s trial graphics. You want to prove your point, support the claims, and make them believe this smoothie was worth the money.” — Ian Lowe

And he’s right. Because even if your doc stack is flawless, if you hand it to the judge in a Solo cup labeled “Exhibit A?” with a half-smudged Post-it—well, congrats. You’ve just un-sold the smoothie. Presentation is delivery, tone, context, and the show around the substance.

This is where Reveal steps in like a stage manager on double espresso: running timelines, stitching visuals to facts, and making sure your evidence walks, talks, and makes the jury lean in. It’s the moment where credibility becomes visible. Where your narrative doesn’t just tell—it shows.

Because in court, you’re not just proving a point. You’re making it irresistible.

From Banana Peels to Courtroom Wins

So, whether you’re a litigation partner plotting a discovery strategy, a fresh-faced BDR trying to spell “spoliation,” or a burned-out Big Law alum like me who found redemption in AI, know this: eDiscovery isn’t just boxes on a flowchart. It’s a team sport.

It’s knowing what ingredients you’ve got, what’s already spoiled, and what you need to chase down before opposing counsel does. It’s skipping the banana peel, blending only the good stuff, and delivering a courtroom-ready masterpiece that actually lands.

So, whether you’re stepping into your first matter or your fiftieth courtroom, the takeaway is this: great discovery is never robotic. It’s human. It’s messy. It’s collaborative. And with the right process—and the right metaphor—you don’t just survive it. You make something damn good.

Now go blend something brilliant.

—Cat Casey, Legal AI Influencer & Smoothie Sommelier of eDiscovery
(with a high-five to Ian Lowe, Smoothie Whisperer and BDR Sensei Supreme).