Every eDiscovery project manager has, at some point, inherited someone else's "clever" workflow and spent a week trying to work out what on earth it actually does. It usually made perfect sense to the person who built it. It usually makes sense to nobody else, especially six months later when that person has moved teams, moved firms, or simply forgotten their own logic.

One of the points that stuck with me from Season 2 of Down in the Bunker came from Ed Lawrence of Epiq. His view is that, as far as possible, projects should be grounded in a common, standardised approach rather than something custom built each time. Not because standardisation is exciting (it isn't), but because bespoke, one-off builds create two problems by default: defensibility and knowledge transfer.

Defensibility first. In a regulated, evidence-driven industry, being able to explain exactly what happened to a document from collection through to production isn't optional. Ed's concern is that workflows which become too custom are less defensible, and hard to look back on six or twelve months later and recap what was actually done. A workflow that's been standardised, documented and used consistently across matters is far easier to stand behind than something built on the fly for one specific case. If a process is challenged, "here's our standard approach, applied consistently" is a much stronger position than "here's what we did that one time."

Then there's knowledge transfer, which is really a people problem dressed up as a technology problem. Custom workflows tend to live in one person's head. When that person is on annual leave, off sick, or has left the business entirely, whoever picks up the project is starting from zero. A standardised approach means any competent team member can step in, understand the logic, and carry on without reverse engineering someone else's creativity. Ed's own safeguard is a simple one: at Epiq they try to have at least two people on every project, whatever the size, so there's always a backup and no single point of failure.

None of this is an argument against innovation, or against adapting to the matter in front of you (Ed was quick to acknowledge that every matter is different). New tools, new AI capabilities and new ways of handling data are exactly what should be pushing the industry forward, and there's plenty of room for that. The distinction worth drawing is between innovating on the tools you use and reinventing the wheel on every single matter. The first moves the industry on. The second just makes life harder for whoever inherits the project next.

If there's a single practical takeaway, it's this: before you build something clever and bespoke for a project, ask whether it actually needs to be. More often than not, the boring, standardised, well documented option is the one that saves everyone time in the long run, including future you.

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