The Sedona Conference Glossary: eDiscovery & Digital Information Management
The Sedona Conference · Sixth edition, December 2025 (fifth edition February 2020, published in The Sedona Conference Journal, Volume 21) · 2025
Access and status
Cost
Free
Free to read or download at source. No account, no purchase.
Status
Current
Current as at the verification date below. Standards and tools both move — confirm at source before you rely on it.
What it is
A controlled vocabulary for ediscovery and digital information management, defining the terms that appear in ESI protocols, expert reports, and court orders.
Who it is for, and when
Use it to settle definitional fights before they reach a judge, and to pin down terms in an ESI protocol so that "native format", "metadata", or "deduplication" mean the same thing to both sides. Examiners writing for lawyers should check their terminology against it, since this is the vocabulary the court is most likely to have seen. It is also the cheapest way for a new litigator to get oriented.
What it does not cover
It defines terms; it states no legal standard and resolves no dispute, and its definitions are not authoritative on any technical discipline — a forensic examiner should not treat them as substitutes for the vocabulary of a standards body. The PDF requires a free Sedona Conference account.
Go to the source
Open at thesedonaconference.org (opens in a new tab)https://thesedonaconference.org/publication/The_Sedona_Conference_Glossary
Details
- Type
- Standard or guidance
- Written for
- New to the fieldLawyers and courtsWorking examinerNew to the field, Lawyers and courts, Working examiner
- Publisher
- The Sedona Conference
- Version verified
- Sixth edition, December 2025 (fifth edition February 2020, published in The Sedona Conference Journal, Volume 21)
- Year
- 2025
- Topics
- ediscovery, standards-development, evidence-handling
- Checked at source
- Standards are revised. Confirm the current revision with the publisher before citing this.
Related entries
A 27-page code of practice setting out requirements and guidance for each ediscovery activity, from initiating a matter and issuing preservation instructions through to producing ESI. It is the operational part of the ISO/IEC 27050 series.
A roughly 1,500-page updated treatise covering discovery and admission of electronic evidence against federal and state rules and case law, in eight chapters, with companion Best Practices Guides including an information technology primer for lawyers.
Nuix Workstation
PaidA commercial investigation and data-processing platform aimed at very large unstructured data sets, combining forensic-style processing with ediscovery-grade indexing, deduplication, and export. Nuix now positions its offerings under the Nuix Neo platform, with Workstation still listed as a product alongside Nuix Discover for review.
The federal sanctions rule for lost ESI. It applies only where information that should have been preserved in the anticipation or conduct of litigation is lost because a party failed to take reasonable steps to preserve it and it cannot be restored or replaced through additional discovery, and it reserves the severe measures — adverse inference, dismissal, default — for a finding that the party acted with intent to deprive another party of the information's use.
A 38-page international standard covering the first four handling activities for potential digital evidence: identification, collection, acquisition and preservation. It names the device classes in scope, including computer storage media, mobile phones, memory cards, navigation systems, still and video cameras including CCTV, and TCP/IP networks.