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Back in 2006, when Cliff Dutton served as chief technical editor for the creation of the first Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), the workflow he helped establish saw most of its action and attention focused in on the middle data handling and analysis components.

But over the last decade Dutton, now serving as chief innovation officer for Epiq, has seen the EDRM increasingly extended towards its extremities. “We believe that workflow has served the industry well, and we believe it'll work well as we move both left and right,” he noted.

Epiq's newly launched TMX, a subscription-based case preparation and collaboration tool, is the company's latest effort to pull the EDRM workflow out to the right. The platform, now available to Epiq's international clients and expected to be released this year to its U.S. clients, houses information “bundles,” or trial packages complete with metadata, identifying tags and prior coding, in a centralized, web-based platform for attorneys to reference as they prepare for trial.

Dutton sees the extension of EDRM as part and parcel of the core guidances of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). “It's always helpful in the U.S. to go back to Rule 1 [of the FRCP], a just, speedy and inexpensive determination. When we move right, and we create efficiency as we move to trial, we move toward that goal.”

Epiq's new product is an attempt to help attorneys streamline the process of taking e-discovery analysis and assembling it into presentation-ready data. “Documents, now rather than being delivered electronically on media to the requesting party, they're loaded into the production environment at TMX,” he said.

Dutton explained that the platform was released first to international clients because of the prevalence of electronic courtrooms outside the U.S. “We look at this as an app that makes it possible for all of our international clients, corporations and counsel to use this as their electronic courtroom,” he said.

The TMX platform is mindful of the collaborative work attorneys typically need to manage in assembling documents prior to trial. The platform has both built in permission controls and collaborative workviews.

“Collaboration can exist across legal teams, to clients, to experts assigned to the matter, and even opposing parties. You can now have a collaborative environment for that final presentation bundled together,” Dutton explained. “That collaboration happened in forms like an email thread. Now all of that happens in a common platform.”

The TMX system currently operates as a web-based platform. A standalone version will also be available for users to operate offline.

“We are hoping that we can contribute to the efficient determination of all of the mattes that our clients need to address. This is our contribution to that on the right side of the EDRM,” Dutton added.