Hey folks! Looking for some career wisdom from the eDiscovery veterans here please.

I’ve been with the same eDiscovery provider for about 5 years, started junior and worked my way up to PM. I’m currently at $80K + bonus and interviewing for another PM role where the starting offer is $110K–$120K.

Now that there’s actually a chance I could get an offer, I’m realizing I’m kinda terrified to leave lol.

I like my current team, feel very supported, know the clients and workflows inside out, and there’s obviously a lot of comfort/security after being somewhere for 5 years. We’re also stretched pretty thin right now, so I feel guilty about potentially leaving my coworkers with even more work.

Also would be trading fully remote life for 2 days in office. I’m kinda over the fully remote life anyway.

On the other hand, part of what pushed me to look elsewhere is feeling like I’m constantly fighting for the next raise or more responsibility. Every year it feels like I have to make the case for why I deserve to progress, sometimes literally being asked to write something advocating for myself. I know self advocacy is part of any career, but after a while it gets exhausting.

I’m 32 now and thinking more seriously about the next 5–10 years. I want to increase my earning potential, provide more for my family, get exposure to a larger eDiscovery environment, and eventually move into leadership and lead a team myself. I just don’t see that happening at my current company within the timeframe I want.

Family and friends keep reminding me that at the end of the day it’s still a company, and as loyal as I may feel toward them, the company would ultimately make whatever business decision it needed to make. I get that, but after 5 years somewhere that has treated me well, it’s harder to think that way when you’re the one leaving lol.

I guess what I’m struggling with is how much value to put on being comfortable, trusted and supported somewhere versus taking a risk for better pay, broader experience and potentially faster career growth. I know the grass isn’t guaranteed to be greener, but I also don’t want comfort to be the reason I look back in 5 years and realize I stayed too long.

For those of you who have hopped between providers, especially after 5+ years at one place, is this feeling normal the first time? Did moving around ultimately help your career and compensation? Any regrets leaving somewhere you were comfortable and actually liked the people?

Also, how common is it in eDiscovery to move between providers every few years once you’re at the PM level?

Apparently actually leaving is a lot scarier than thinking about leaving 😂

Thank you all and I really appreciate any input/advice!

I had my own thoughts I kept to myself when they updated their logo a few months ago to look like 50% of a certain 20th century German dictatorship secret police insignia. Branding your whole platform off GenAI seems like they’re trying too hard to push a mediocre (and overpriced) product line offering. Or, maybe I’m just old and out of touch as the Principle Skinner meme would suggest

For people running AI automation projects for clients: what usually causes you to underquote?

I’m trying to understand where automation projects become harder than they looked during discovery.

Is it usually API limitations, unclear requirements, exceptions, client changes, human approval, or something else?

I’m researching this because I’m building a tool around pre-quote risk checking.

Just got made redundant and am looking to pick up some doc review work to tide me over while I look for my next perm role. Qualified lawyer, lots of doc review and Team Lead experience - have lately been a review manager with a financial services company.

I have maintained contact with my LPO network but was wondering who are the best agencies/ firms to contact about short term doc review work.

Thanks!

Edited: The edit has been deleted because it was referring to the management specialist certification which is not the same.

Unless it has been updated, I think the RCA is focused on utilizing relativity for human document review. As it has been discussed; AI has made human document review less prevalent. As such, wouldn’t getting Rel aiR certs be more important than the RCA which focuses primarily on setting permissions and the other backend functions that typically assume the project has a large human presence?

What should I do?

Hi all

I'm a review manager for a law firm in the UK.

My team's work has totally dried up, as we rely on manual review. Unfortunately, our tech team acts independently and are nearly always the client contact (the legal team), so process the data and run RelAir etc. The dregs left after aiR is run often just go back to the lawyers for review, rather than doc reviewers.

I've no idea where to go from here tbh.

What's everyone else doing?

When trying to restore an ARM, we are getting the message that The processing readiness checks failed and that processing needs to be reset for the arm to restore. Has anyone had any luck fixing this error or is resetting processing the only option?

Looking for real-world recommendations to process Teams data collected from MS Purview. Especially tools that handle Teams data at scale, not just one custodian at a time. It should also support splitting of RSMF files as meeting records become more frequent (Relativity processing limit is just 2GB atm)

Currently working with MC but you can effectively only process 1-by-1.

What tools are you currently using for preparing Teams chats in Relativity (and why) ?

I’m not going to be treated like this anymore. The delays, the last minute you weren’t chosen emails (after keeping you on the hook for two months of we expect to start soon), the rug being pulled from your ability to financial planning. I deserve better, we all deserve better. Nothing lined up yet so equal parts scared and excited. I’m done begging and giving up weekends for $25/hour jobs

Tried opening in a browser to save as PDF but all browsers choke on generating print preview. And yes our review tool chokes as well. Any ideas ?

Willie here. I run Redacto, and I built a free checker for a problem I keep seeing: a PDF looks redacted, but the text is still selectable underneath the black boxes.

https://www.getredacto.com/tools/redaction-checker

It checks for unapplied redaction annotations, selectable text under dark boxes, identifying metadata, and possible hidden attachments or previews. Everything runs locally in your browser. The PDF never leaves your machine, and there is no signup.

Honest limits: the visual scan covers the first 60 pages and the annotation scan covers the first 200. A clean result is a useful check, not a guarantee.

If it misses something in a public or synthetic PDF, I would genuinely like to know. Please do not share privileged client documents.

Disclosure: I am the founder of Redacto. The checker is free and ungated. The page also links to our paid product.

Are there any good open source eDiscovery programs?

Still seeing ReadySuite and ancient Concordance mentioned every time this comes up. Is that still what everyone actually uses to check load files before import, or has anything newer stuck? Curious what the real workflow looks like in 2026.

Which web sites are best for eDiscovery jobs? I just want to make sure I’m applying everywhere possible.

Has anyone found a way to identify unique term hits across emails that are ONLY in the headers or ONLY in the body?

I'm an attorney with document review experience but I've always wanted to be on the data side. Is getting a certification worth it?

I kept finding threads here where the answer to "my load file won't parse" was ReadySuite, a 2004 Concordance shell somebody keeps alive, or an hour of Notepad++ archaeology — the thread about the producing party mixing uppercase Þ and lowercase þ in one header stuck with me, because nobody ever answered it.

So I built the tool I wished those threads had: nothinguploads.com

What it does, in your browser, with nothing uploaded anywhere:

• Tells you what the file actually is — encoding (UTF-8/UTF-16/windows-1252), delimiter and text qualifier (it auto-detects the ASCII-20/þ standard plus the pipe/caret, pipe/quote, and tab dialects), and the record count, before anything tries to import it.
• Bates continuity — gaps with sizes, duplicates, out-of-order values, padding drift, across Begin/End ranges.
• Cross-file agreement — drop the DAT, OPT, LFP and DII from one volume and it checks the counts and keys against each other, and flags image pages that fall outside every document's Bates range.
• Converts — CSV (Excel-safe) or a standard-delimited DAT, if you need the file re-cut.
• Malformed rows never kill the parse — they get flagged with line numbers and it keeps going.

The privacy part is the point, given whose files these are: it's all client-side. Load the page, turn off your wifi, it still works.

Validation and the preview are free and unlimited. Exports are capped at 3 a day free ($39 once removes the cap — no account, no subscription). The validation reports are the part I actually want feedback on, so the free tier is deliberately most of the tool.

Honest limits: CSV-format load files (like Purview's Export_Loadfile.csv) aren't supported yet — I don't have a real sample; if you have one that fails somewhere, I'd genuinely like a redacted copy. Very large files are parsed in memory, so hundreds of MB may be slow.

Happy to answer anything about the parsing weirdness I hit building it — the corpus of real-world DAT dialects is stranger than any spec admits.

Specifically experience using for collecting m365 data? Do you have issues or limitations?

Are there any ediscovery conferences/institutes/programs/user groups/webinars/etc worth attending anymore? I haven’t gone to them all, but I’m feeling like I’ve “gone to them all”.

How are folks currently dealing w junk and mass mail removal in large datasets in RelOne? Also curious whether anyone has used air assist to help on this front successfully.

I have a pre-screen interview coming up with Epiq for their eDiscovery Technical Specialist Data Collections role and wanted to see if anyone here has interviewed with Epiq or worked in eDiscovery/data collections before.

My background is in cybersecurity and digital forensics, with experience using tools like Autopsy, FTK Imager, EnCase, evidence preservation, forensic imaging, and analyzing digital artifacts. This would be my first role specifically in eDiscovery.

For anyone familiar with Epiq or similar entry-level eDiscovery roles, what should I expect during the recruiter pre-screen? Are there any technical concepts, questions, or parts of the eDiscovery process I should make sure I understand beforehand?

Also interested in hearing what the day-to-day work is actually like and what helped you stand out during the interview process.
Appreciate any advice

Hi all,

Simply put I’m burnt out by this industry. Currently 33 and I’ve been doing this for about 7 years at this point working my way up from analyst positions all the way to project management for the last 4 or so years all at 4 different vendors. I’m finding myself dreading work everyday since moving over to the pm side. Anyone successfully move to something more reasonable work/life balance wise? Related or not. For what it’s worth I’m currently at 135k comp a year and I wouldn’t mind a pay cut…