eDiscovery Trends: Conduct Yourself Ethically with EDRM’s Model Code of Conduct
July 24, 2012
The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) has made numerous contributions to the eDiscovery industry since it was founded in 2005, with the EDRM diagram (above) having become a universally accepted standard – rare in our industry – to reflect the eDiscovery life cycle. Last year, we noted the introduction of the EDRM Model Code of Conduct (MCoC), which focuses on the ethical duties of service providers associated with these five key principles and also provides a corollary for each principle to illustrate ethical duties of their clients. Now, your organization can subscribe to the MCoC to demonstrate its commitment to conducting itself in an ethical manner.
As the invitation email (to subscribe) from EDRM notes, “The MCoC was drafted by members of the EDRM MCoC Project and reflects years of exhaustive dialogue and a wide array of viewpoints representative of the interests of corporations, law firms and service providers…[It] is designed to promote predictability and stability in the legal industry for both providers and consumers of electronic discovery products and services.”
You can read the code online here, or download it as a 22 page PDF file here. To voluntarily subscribe to the MCoC, you can register on the EDRM website here. Identify your organization, provide information for an authorized representative and answer four verification questions (truthfully, of course) to affirm your organization’s commitment to the spirit of the MCoC, and your organization is in! You can also provide a logo for EDRM to include when adding you to the list of subscribing organizations. As of this writing, there are 39 subscribing organizations listed here, including CloudNine Discovery, the company I work for (and sponsor of this blog, in case you haven’t noticed).
So, what do you think? Is your organization subscribed? If not, what’s stopping you? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.
