The White House in Washington, D.C. at night. July 9, 2018.

Your last business trip is about to look pretty tame: On Feb. 13, representatives from the Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists (ACEDS) visited the Executive Office at the White House to deliver an on-site training session to 26 employees specializing in information governance, records management and IT.

The visit—which focused on the essentials of e-discovery—marked a first for ACEDS, which has conducted many live training sessions in the past, but never at the behest of the federal government.

“You don't think of yourself doing those kinds of things,” said Mary Mack, executive director of ACEDS.

Joining Mack onsite at the White House was Shannon Bales of FTI Consulting, David Greetham of Ricoh USA, and ACEDS vice president of engagement Kaylee Walstad. The group was invited to present by Kenya Parrish-Dixon, assistant director of the division of litigation technology and analysis at the Federal Trade Commission.

“She wanted the staff to have a comprehensive end-to-end training so that even if it was just somebody who had a small part as a part of their larger duties in the e-discovery process, that they would understand what the other players on the team would need from them or the kinds of decisions that they would make,” Mack said.

ACEDS usually provides live training to what Mack called “serial litigants,” entities like financial institutions that are highly regulated and constantly producing documents of one kind or another. The aim is to help them reduce duplicate data and learn techniques to thin the information herd.

“Things that we take for granted in the e-discovery community, organizations that haven't faced that, they're just starting from scratch. I'm not saying that that's where the White House was, but that's one of the benefits, the ability to reduce the amount of data you need to have human eyes on,” Mack said.

Traditional businesses also typically have a records retention schedule in place so that documents are destroyed once they are no longer useful to business. Taking that into consideration, a typical ACEDS session would stress the importance of preservation.

But such warnings might have come across as a little redundant in the Executive Office of the White House. There's a law, the Presidential Records Act of 1978, requiring the preservation of all presidential records. The office has had over 40 years to put the necessary procedures in place to do just that.

In addition to changing the focus on preservation, the training also had to insert some placeholders to address the alternate sets of rules for regulatory, congressional and criminal procedures that would be of particular relevance at the White House.

“There are different risk levels, criminal being a very high risk and a congressional inquiry being a high risk, maybe underneath the criminal. Regulatory would be next and then civil litigation and then public records requests,” Mack said.

Also complicating things somewhat are the different standards surrounding civil litigation and, say, a public records request, including when and how a piece of information can be redacted. Trying to address every eventuality in the course of a single seminar could make for a long day at the office.

“There were some significant areas where these are the places you need to consult your in-house legal team to explain what are you responding to,” Mack said.