The harder question on the RGR staircase isn't which step a matter belongs on — it's which step each custodian belongs on. A three-condition framework for allocating fidelity custodian by custodian, on the record at the Rule 26(f) conference.
AI review is getting cheaper, fast.
Relativity bundled aiR for Review and aiR for Privilege into standard RelativityOne packaging. Everlaw made single-document AI actions free. GenAI-assisted review pricing is now clustering in the $0.11–$0.50 range — challenging the $0.50–$1.00 band where human review still lives.
The industry is celebrating the new unit economics.
But nobody is asking what those AI models are actually reviewing — or how much of it should never have entered the pipeline.
A first tenant-bounded measurement of linked-document version drift, on a platform-versioning measure — and what it suggests for the standard's conformance staircase.
A short playbook for advisory teams who want to answer the conformance question without overpromising, without dismissing it, and without breaking the two seconds of silence that follow.
How a technical question about preservation architecture quietly became a question about professional ethics — in twenty-eight days and six blog posts.
ABA Comment 8 doesn't require you to build a forensic preservation system. It does require you to know whether your workflow silently loses evidence — and to say so.
Craig Ball's engagement with the RGR Standard surfaced a real vulnerability in the conformance model. Here's the conversation — and what it led to.
Before I brought this argument to the profession, I tried to break it. Two AI systems argued the Preservation Gap under Rule 37(e) — and the objections that survived forced significant revisions.
Rule 37(e) requires "reasonable steps" to preserve ESI. When evidence lives in Teams, Slack, and SharePoint, preservation steps designed for email may be structurally incomplete — even when they execute correctly.
When a SharePoint link resolves successfully but the produced document is not the version that existed at send time, the evidentiary record is silently wrong.