Mary Mack, executive director of ACEDS, left, and Kaylee Walstad, vice president of client engagement of ACEDS, right. Mary Mack, CEO and chief legal technology of EDRM, left, and Kaylee Walstad, chief strategy officer of EDRM, right.

The EDRM is best known as the organization behind the E-Discovery Reference Model and a number of other technological standards for the e-discovery industry. But since its inception, it has also served as an educational and project hub for e-discovery, first under founders George Socha and Tom Gelbmann, then under Duke University School of Law's Center for Judicial Studies following its 2016 integration.

Now, much of the EDRM organization is finding a new home under ownership that knows a thing or two about e-discovery education: former ACEDS heads Mary Mack and Kaylee Walstad.

Mack and Walstad announced today that they have purchased much of the EDRM organization from Duke Law School and are taking over the organization's technology and education initiatives. Duke Law's partnership with the Electronic Discovery Institute for certification will remain with the school, and the organization's membership program that has ramped down through 2019 is not part of the deal. Mack will be EDRM's CEO and chief legal technologist, while Walstad will take the title of chief strategy officer.

Financial details for the deal have not been made public, but the two told Legaltech News that they do not currently have outside funding for the transaction. Mack said the intention is to run EDRM with a Women Business Enterprise (WBE) certification, "and our partners will be able to benefit from that in some of their RFP pursuits." She did add that funding is not out of the question, but in a limited way, saying, "We're looking for more of a structured minority investment that would allow us to be a WBE."

Upon leaving ACEDS, Mack said in an interview with LTN her intention was to explore more of the technical side of e-discovery, saying, "I stopped being hands on eight or nine years ago, and I'm a tech person." The EDRM certainly fits—among the organization's prior initiatives are not only the reference model itself, but the EDRM XML to facilitate data transfer, standardizing test data sets, and more.

She noted the EDRM will continue to be "multidisciplinary, global, without hierarchy, where lawyers work with legal professionals." And because of the base that EDRM has cultivated since its 2005 founding, she and Walstad believed it would be a more worthwhile investment than bootstrapping their own, new organization.

"The EDRM is like graffiti—it's everywhere," Mack explained. "Every slide deck has the EDRM in it. It's one of the most recognizable brands, and when it was available, oh my gosh, why not try? So we were bold, we tried, and we got it."

Walstad added that remaining as part of a separate, fourth estate solution was important to both going forward. "One of the best things about ACEDS was that Mary created a Switzerland, a place for everyone to belong," she said. "The EDRM is exactly that, a Switzerland place for everyone to go to."

The EDRM is not leaving Duke Law on a sour note. David Levi, former dean of Duke Law School and current director of the school's Bolch Judicial Institute, told Legaltech News that he's excited for the potential of EDRM, and through his conversations with Mack and Walstad "it was very clear that they would be able to tap that potential in uniquely focused way."

The deal, he said, will allow Duke and the Bolch Institute to collaborate on "projects and programs that fit our mission without having to manage the day-to-day operation of an exciting—and demanding—organization that will, when it really meets its potential, require more support than we can provide. At Duke, EDRM has been part of a portfolio of projects. With Mary and Kaylee, it will have the attention and leadership it needs to take off."

Also praising the deal was EDRM co-founder Socha, now a managing director at BDO Consulting. He noted that he's known Mack dating back to before EDRM was even around, and he "could not have asked for a better set of people to take charge of EDRM and move it to the next level."

He said that from the beginning, the organization wanted to act as a hub, with "people coming from all different areas and different directions," including not only law firms, corporate legal departments and service providers, but those working on processing, collection and even marketing and sales. "Then, I was adamant that those folks, once they became part of EDRM, should all be placed on equal footing. I did not want an initiative that elevated one group above the others."

The continued success of EDRM, Socha said, will be an extension of that mission. "I think the single most important thing to keep that spirit of collaboration moving forward is a clear message from the people in charge, Mary and Kaylee, that that is an important factor in all this. I think if they continue to be consistent in letting people know that really matters, after a 14 year history, EDRM should be able to continue that moving forward." He also added that Mack and Walstad "have demonstrated with what they've done to date that that is a value they hold dear to them as well."

Indeed, collaboration was a big piece of Mack and Walstad's plan for the organization when they spoke with Legaltech News. They noted that they're currently in the process of speaking with project leaders, and among the changes they're hoping to make will be more inclusivity. That includes changes to EDRM's structure, as Mack noted that the EDRM will no longer be taking memberships. "The EDRM will be open to everybody. It will no longer be a member organization."

The EDRM will also be looking to develop its partner network and community-created content, and Mack said she has already engaged some potential partners ahead of the deal's announcement. One of those partners is ZyLAB, Mack and Walstad's former employer and an EDRM partner since the organization's founding.

Johannes Scholtes, founder and chairman of the board at ZyLAB, told Legaltech News that he's excited for Mack and Walstad's leadership of the organization, particularly with its focus on giving a meeting place for the technical side of e-discovery.

"ACEDS is absolutely such a platform, but ACEDS has more legal focus, and EDRM always had more technical focus," Scholtes said. "It's really good that next to ACEDS, which will continue to work on legal standards … we have a second platform that will continue to work on more of the data-oriented problems."

He added that he would love to see not only continued standards from the organization, but also more technical education and webinars. Scholtes added, "I'm sure that Mary and Kaylee will find these topics where the market is in need, and I think that the market is large enough to support both the ACEDS and EDRM organizations to provide education in the e-discovery space."