ESI Protocol and Collection Plan
Four documents and three registers that fix what counts as one document in every source, then price every proposed search term.
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Stipulated ESI Protocol · section 3
What constitutes a document
Every bracket fills from a row in the Format Specification. A clause with no row behind it is a clause somebody copied from a form bank.
| Source | One document means | Window | Day boundary |
|---|---|---|---|
| [message, attachments as family] | n/a | n/a | |
| Loose files | [file] | n/a | n/a |
| [Chat platform] | [message / conversation-day / responsive item plus a window] | [hours] | [cut where, in which time zone] |
| [Second chat platform] | [the same three choices, answered again] | [hours] | [cut where, in which time zone] |
| [Structured system] | [record with its comment history] | n/a | n/a |
Answered per source, not once for the whole protocol
Also stated whether overlapping windows merge · what happens to edited messages, deleted messages and reactions · whether a file shared into a conversation is a family member of the message that shared it · what the production identifier is applied to, since a unit with no page has nothing to stamp.
The test for whether this section is specific enough: a different vendor, given the same export, would produce the same number of documents.
A model ESI order is a list of clauses about file types. Single-page TIFF, extracted text, a load file, natives for spreadsheets. Underneath all of it sits a question the clause list never asks, which is what one document is. Email settled that thirty years ago, since a message is a document and its attachments are its family. Chat settles nothing: a Slack export arrives as a ZIP where each conversation gets a folder and its messages are split by date.
Almadine Robotics collected 2,080,400 items across mail, cloud files, Teams, Slack, Jira and two laptop images. Counted as individual messages, that is the review population. Counted with Slack as its 38,600 channel-day files and Teams as its 9,240 transcripts, the population is 698,240. One sentence, worth 1,382,160 documents. On the Slack half by itself, 1,184,000 messages at 55 an hour is 21,527 review hours against 1,755 hours for the same content as channel-days, which at $48 is $1,033,309 against $84,218.
Terms get measured the same way. In that matter develop* reached 118,600 documents and returned a responsive one for $420, while the project code name reached 1,842 and returned one for $1.48. Only the unique-hit column and a sampled rate tell them apart. How the collection ran matters too, since Microsoft documents that a date-range query groups Teams messages into 24-hour transcripts while a keyword query takes twelve hours either side of each hit. What the terms reach splits two ways: produced, or withheld to a log written to the elements claimed.
What's in the pack
ESI Protocol
The stipulation itself, where every clause points at a row in a sheet. It is the thing the written responses then have to match.
Custodian and Source Register
One row per system: custodians, items collected, what the export natively produces, and the retention setting recorded as it was found.
Format Specification
What one document means in each source, with the window in hours, the day boundary, the time zone, and the date of the test load.
Search Term Register
Hits, unique hits, a sampled responsiveness rate with its denominator, and the review cost each term buys a responsive document for. Those counts are the population the discovery budget then multiplies.
What a Document Is Here
The method behind the grouping decision, and what each of the three units costs to review and to redact consistently.
Preservation Notice
Two versions. What a custodian has to stop doing, and the three export questions the systems administrator answers before collection.
Collection Plan
The sequence, the method per source class, and the item count you expected written down before the source returns a tenth of it.
A Term Without a Count Is a Guess
The space rule every prompt reads first, on measuring a burden instead of asserting one, and on what never goes in here.
How to use it
- 1
Open in River, or take it blank
Open the pack in River and hand it what your IT team has said about each platform, or take the Word documents and CSV sheets from the template library.
- 2
Inventory the systems, not the documents
What each platform is, who is on it, how many items it holds, what its export natively produces, and the retention window as found. Nothing is negotiated on this pass.
- 3
Answer the unit question per source
For each chat source: message, conversation-day, or responsive item plus a stated window. Then the hours, the day boundary, its time zone, and the treatment of edits and reactions.
- 4
Price the terms, then draft
Each proposed term runs against the population the first two steps defined, and the protocol drafts from the three sheets. A clause with no row behind it does not go in.
Frequently asked questions
Is this template free?
Yes, and there is no account or card in the way. The zip holds four Word documents and three CSV registers. Edit with AI is the other branch: the agent builds the source inventory from what your IT team can tell it, then works the format questions. The rest of the template library is free the same way.
What format are the downloaded files?
Word (.docx) for the four documents and CSV (.csv) for the three registers, in one zip. Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets opens the registers directly, and the protocol, the notice and the collection plan open in Word or Pages. There is no conversion step and nothing proprietary.
Do the federal rules say what counts as one document?
No. Rule 26(f)(3)(C) puts the form or forms of production into the discovery plan, and Rule 34(b)(2)(E) says a party need not produce the same information in more than one form. Form is named in the rule. The unit is not, which is exactly why it has to be named in the stipulation.
Does this collect the data or run the searches?
No. It produces the agreement and the numbers each clause rests on. Your vendor or review platform runs the exports and returns the hit counts, and the registers record what came back, including the sources that returned far less than the plan expected.
The other side already sent their protocol. Is this any use?
That is the better case for it. Their draft becomes rows in the Format Specification, one per source, and the omissions surface as blanks: no unit named for chat, no window in hours, no day boundary, no time zone. A redline argued from blanks reads differently from one argued from preferences.
What does Edit with AI actually do?
It signs you up, installs this exact pack as a private workspace, and puts the agent in front of an empty Custodian and Source Register. Send the pleadings and whatever IT has said about each platform, and the unanswered format questions come back before a single clause gets drafted.
What happens once the production actually arrives?
This agreement is the thing it gets measured against, one field at a time. Validating the load file, the images and the natives against each other is where a delivery that does not match the specification shows up, and the chronology built from the produced set starts from what survived.
Decide what a document is before anything is collected
Take the Word documents and CSV registers blank, or open this exact pack in River and hand it the systems list.
Edit with AI