Effective project management is an essential component in the litigation discovery process. Unlike other practice areas, litigation requires meeting numerous court deadlines, following various rules of civil procedure, and bartering with opposing counsel to reach agreements. Non-compliance can be costly, where hundreds of thousands of dollars can be handed down as sanctions. Effective project management enables lawyers to rely on their vendors to assist them in achieving these requirements on-time and on-budget.

The industry does not have a consistent definition of a project manager, however, for our purposes, we will define him/her as the technically skilled and legally knowledgeable intermediary between the law firm client and the vendor's IT staff that guides the flow of electronically stored information (ESI) throughout the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM). A project manager's duties include but are not limited to the following: