Open standard for collaboration-platform eDiscovery collection fidelity - help me break it
Hi r/legaltech. Long-time lurker, first-time poster.
Over the last year I've been working on an open, vendor-neutral standard called Reconstruction-Grade eDiscovery (RGR). It tries to define what "preserved the right evidence" actually means when the evidence lives in Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Slack - platforms that broke most of the assumptions traditional eDiscovery collection was built on.
I'd rather get critique than an audience, so here's the thesis in one paragraph - tell me where it breaks.
Traditional eDiscovery assumes messages carry fixed attachments, threads live in single containers, and a file collected today is the file the custodian saw. Collaboration platforms invalidated all three. Messages reference live documents that change after sending.
Threads fragment across compliance records. Versions diverge between the communication and the collection. Modern attachments orphan when links break. "Reasonable steps" under FRCP 37(e) increasingly means something different for this evidence class than for email - but the industry hasn't had a shared vocabulary for what a capable collection methodology actually preserves.
RGR tries to be that vocabulary. It defines four conformance tiers (RG-Aware → RG-Core → RG-Plus → RG-Max) for collection fidelity, and requires exception reporting so defensibility is auditable rather than assumed.
For anyone who wants the shortest path in, I wrote a four-week, six-post narrative arc that walks through the problem, the case law, and the framework: https://rgrstandard.org/blog/four-weeks-six-blog-posts/