The EDRM* has served the industry since 2006, and EDRM 2.0, opened for public comment in the summer of 2026, extends analysis across the workflow and grounds discovery in a broader governance lifecycle. It is a real improvement. It also keeps the phase structure, adding AI as a capability inside each stage rather than asking which stages the underlying technology has made unnecessary.
| EDRM (2006 / 2.0) | The Living Discovery Model |
|---|---|
| Identification | 01 Connected Corpus |
| Collection | |
| Processing | 02 Continuous Indexing |
| Preservation | Foundation, not a numbered stage. Runs underneath all five. |
| Identification (search) | 03 Retrieval-Augmented Discovery |
| Analysis | |
| Review | 04 AI-First Review with Validation |
| Production | 05 Explainable Production |
| Presentation | |
| Information Governance | Assumed as a precondition of a governed, permissioned Connected Corpus, rather than a standalone left-side phase. |
These were two events because you had to find data before you could physically move it somewhere else. A permissioned, connected corpus does both at once, nothing moves, so finding and accessing are the same act.
Search used to finish before understanding could start, search terms first, review second. Conversational retrieval collapses that sequence: a system can evaluate a document's relevance in the same turn it surfaces it.
A static export followed by a courtroom explanation made sense when the explanation had to be assembled by hand after the fact. When reasoning is generated alongside the document, the export and the explanation are one artifact.
The one phase that doesn't collapse, it changes jobs entirely. Collection used to double as your defensibility anchor: copying data out kept it safe from deletion. Here, the data stays in place inside the corporation's own systems instead, so preservation has to hold two things at once, enforcing deletion holds on live production data, and logging exactly what the AI accessed. That's why it moves from a phase to the foundation everything else sits on.
EDRM 2.0 was developed by roughly 150 practitioners across the industry, and it makes real improvements, extending analysis across the workflow and grounding discovery in the updated Information Governance Reference Model. The Living Discovery Model starts from a different premise: that the constraint EDRM was built to manage, data that has to move before anyone can look at it, no longer holds inside a properly governed, AI-native corporation, and that the model built on top of that constraint should not survive it unchanged.
* EDRM.net