Defensible eDiscovery, engineered.
eDiscovery Playbook® is a resource published by Law & Forensics, a legal engineering firm. We help corporations, legal departments, and law firms build, audit, and defend the discovery procedures that hold up when litigation tests them.
A legal engineering firm — not just a vendor.
Law & Forensics sits where law, technology, and evidence meet. Our work spans digital forensics, eDiscovery, cybersecurity, and information governance — the same disciplines a modern dispute draws on all at once. eDiscovery Playbook® distills that practice into something you can use: a clear standard for what a defensible discovery process looks like, and the tools to measure yours against it.
We built this resource because most organizations don’t discover the gaps in their legal-hold, preservation, and collection procedures until a dispute forces them to. Our goal is to move that discovery earlier — when it’s a planning exercise, not a sanctions motion.
Four disciplines, one defensible standard.
eDiscovery
Legal holds, preservation, custodian mapping, collection, review, and production — built as documented, repeatable workflows your whole team can run.
Digital Forensics
Forensically sound collection and analysis across email, mobile, cloud, and collaboration platforms, with chain of custody that withstands challenge.
Cybersecurity
Incident response and investigations — and the security questions that intersect with preservation, breach, and regulatory exposure.
Information Governance
Retention, disposition, and data mapping — so you know where your data lives before a matter makes it urgent.
Principles behind the playbook.
Defensible by design
Courts expect reasonable, good-faith, proportional effort — shown by a documented process, not improvisation under deadline.
Repeatable, not heroic
A process that depends on one person’s memory isn’t a process. We turn institutional knowledge into something the organization owns.
Current with the law
The 2015 FRCP amendments, Rule 37(e), and modern data sources changed the rules. A playbook written against an older standard isn’t defensible.
Expert-backed
When a process is challenged, you need credible expertise behind it. Our team publishes, teaches, and testifies on these questions.
We write about this — and have for two decades.
Our team’s published scholarship on electronic discovery, digital evidence, and emerging-technology law reaches back to the earliest days of modern eDiscovery. We keep it current in our Insights library — practical, plain-English guidance on legal holds, preservation, Rule 26(f) and Rule 37(e), modern collaboration data, and defensible review.
The perspectives a playbook has to satisfy.
A defensible process answers to everyone who touches a matter — the boardroom, the legal department, security, and the lawyers across the table. Here’s what each of them is really asking for.
When litigation hits, I do not want our team inventing the process under pressure. I want a defensible playbook that tells legal, IT, security, HR, and outside counsel exactly what to do, who owns each step, and how we prove it was done correctly.
The board does not need to manage discovery, but it does need confidence that the company has a repeatable, documented, and defensible process before a regulator, court, or plaintiff’s lawyer starts asking hard questions.
Our discovery risk is not just about documents. It is Teams, Slack, mobile devices, cloud platforms, personal devices, ephemeral messaging, and employees working everywhere. A playbook gives us a practical way to control that complexity before it becomes a sanctions issue.
Legal hold and collection cannot be treated as a last-minute legal request to IT. The playbook needs to define systems, access, preservation steps, chain of custody, and escalation paths so technical teams can act quickly without guessing.
The clients who are best positioned in discovery disputes are the ones who can show process. A strong eDiscovery playbook helps us demonstrate reasonableness, proportionality, and defensibility instead of reconstructing decisions after the fact.
Have us assess your eDiscovery playbook.
Start with the free 2-minute readiness scorecard, or book a 30-minute review with a specialist. No obligation, no sales pressure — conflicts are checked before any engagement begins.