The terms "cooperation" and "transparency" continue to gain traction in the context of litigation discovery, and the emergence of these concepts has been accompanied by a gradual erosion of a party's ability to respond to discovery with autonomy. Litigants are often forced to make a decision as the expectation of cooperation in discovery intersects with the understanding that it is the responding party who will be in the best position to formulate a comprehensive discovery plan to search for, gather, and ultimately produce its own electronically stored information (ESI). This is based on the premise that the responding party is best situated to understand its own systems, the formats of communication used by employees, and the lingo used to discuss the subject matter of the dispute.