Agencies do not run discovery the same way. One has a centralized eDiscovery division that delivers into its own platform and does not review. Another has nothing. A vendor that assumes either one is wrong half the time.

Agency SOP compliance eDiscovery work begins with a question most vendors skip: what does this particular agency already do for itself?

The answer changes the entire scope, and it is published more often than people expect.

A worked example

The Environmental Protection Agency’s Discovery Services Policy, Directive No. CIO 2159.2, which supersedes CIO 2159.1, establishes a centralized Discovery Services function run by the agency’s eDiscovery Division. Reading it tells you several things that would otherwise take three meetings.

• The agency has a standard review platform and states that Discovery Services will deliver data in Relativity, the Agency’s standard review platform. A vendor proposing to host in something else is proposing a migration nobody asked for.
• Services are to be provided in an efficient, standardized and defensible manner — defensibility is named as a program goal, which is a hook to hang a methodology discussion on.
• Requests should identify custodians, search parameters and locations of ESI to be collected. That is the agency’s own scoping checklist, and it tells you what the requester will and will not have ready.
• Critically: Discovery Services can facilitate review activities, but does not perform the reviews. Review sits with the program office. So the gap at that agency is reviewers and protocol, not collection and processing.
• Search Points of Contact in the Program and Regional Offices are responsible for initiating requests. The person who calls you may not be the person who can authorize anything.

What the policy does not say, which matters more

The policy does not mention chain of custody. It does not mention CUI or PII handling. It names no load file format, no metadata field list and no image specification — it references a separate Enterprise Information Management minimum metadata standard without reproducing it. It does not mention a COR or the Office of General Counsel.

Those silences are the real lesson. The published policy sets the architecture; the task order sets the requirements. Anyone who tells you an agency’s SOP will define your deliverable specification has not read one.

So what does compliance actually require

• Read the published policy first, then ask for the SOP and the file plan that sit underneath it, by name
• Establish which platform the agency considers standard, and whether your deliverable has to land in it
• Establish who performs review, because that single fact sizes the engagement
• Get the metadata standard, the naming convention and the indexing scheme in writing — they are usually a separate document from the discovery policy
• Confirm the reporting interval and format the COR expects, which is almost never in the policy
• Confirm the CUI handling instruction for the specific data, because the discovery policy may be silent on it
• Document departures. EPA’s own policy requires that all such departures from this policy must be documented with justification, and an agency that holds itself to that will expect the same of you.

How we work

We build to the agency’s SOPs rather than asking the agency to adopt ours. Indexing schemes, naming conventions, reporting cadence, QC thresholds and delivery formats are set by the contract and we build to them. Where the policy is silent, we ask and get it in writing before work starts rather than choosing for the agency and defending it later.

What we do

Pro-Legal Services, Inc. delivers eDiscovery to agency standard operating procedures — reading the published policy, pinning down what it leaves open, building to the agency’s formats and platform, and reporting on the COR’s cadence.

Small business, minority-owned, SAM registered, Arlington Virginia, prime or subcontractor.

Related: litigation support for government agencies, federal agency eDiscovery services, government litigation support contractor, CUI handling litigation support, GCC High eDiscovery, defensible production services, production specification compliance.

Pro-Legal Services, Inc. works to agency procedure from Arlington, Virginia, for federal, state and local agencies in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia and nationwide.

Have a discovery policy but not the SOP underneath it? Send us what you have. Telling you which questions are still open is a short conversation and it saves a change order. Pro-Legal Services, Inc. · 1550 Wilson Blvd, Suite 250, Arlington, VA 22209 · 202-955-9400 · info@pro-legal.com