In the 15+ years I’ve spent working with, building, teaching, and writing about eDiscovery, I’ve noticed a pattern: our tools often lag behind the way people actually work. When we moved from paper to electronic documents, the industry adapted. When we shifted to email as the backbone of communication, our processes evolved again.
But today, we’re facing a deeper, more structural shift - one that fundamentally changes how data is created, shared, stored, and understood.
Yet many of our tools still behave as if we live in a world of files and attachments.
Spoiler: we don’t.
And that gap - between how organizations work and how eDiscovery tools interpret their data - is where risk, waste, and defensibility problems quietly accumulate.
Modern work is collaborative, distributed, and constantly changing across cloud platforms. Think about your own workday. When was the last time you emailed a document as an attachment to a colleague? For most of us, it’s rare.
Documents today:
When a legal team later needs to reconstruct “what happened,” the file itself rarely tells the full story.
But this issue goes far beyond documents.
Custodian context breaks down because people change roles, teams, and access - but discovery tools usually don’t track that history.
Employees don’t stay locked in single roles or departments. They move between teams, get promoted, switch reporting lines, and take on special assignments.
But when we open an eDiscovery tool and search for a custodian…We only see who they are today.
Not who they were during the period that actually matters.
That creates two major risks:
You cannot rely on a current org chart to understand historical roles - yet this is exactly what most teams unknowingly do.
The result is a lack of context at the most fundamental stage of eDiscovery: identification.
The repository problem exists because repository names do not reflect how shared spaces are actually used.
One thing we all know from experience: never assume you know what’s inside a repository based on its label.
A SharePoint site called Product Team might have been:
But current tools rarely show this history in a meaningful way. They treat repositories as if their names are reliable indicators of scope.
As practitioners, we know better. But that doesn’t mean that we have hadany reliable or defensible way to do anything about it.
Repository context - how a shared space was actually used, by whom, and when - is essential to defensible scoping.
More data does not solve eDiscovery problems because data without context does not create understanding.
Every enterprise today is rich in logs, metadata, and behavioralsignals:
But none of this intelligence is connected in a way that meaningfully supports eDiscovery workflows.
Our tools give us data, but they rarely give us understanding.
What we need is the context that ties everything together:
These questions are central to litigation strategy, defensibility, and cost control.
And today, answering them requires guesswork.
Context-Aware eDiscovery is a modern approach designed for thecollaborative, cloud-native environments where enterprise work now happens.
It’s built on a simple premise:
If we want defensible, efficient eDiscovery, we need more than data. We need the context that gives that data meaning.
Context-Aware eDiscovery focuses on three core dimensions:
Identity context captures who a person was during the relevant timeframe, not just who they are today.
This includes:
Accurate identity context is critical for defensible custodian identification and targeted preservation.
Behavioral context shows how individuals actually interacted with data and shared spaces.
This includes:
Behavioral signals provide evidence-based insight into relevance that static metadata cannot.
Document context explains how content evolved across platforms and time.
When these elements come together, everything about the discovery process becomes more accurate:
It’s a smarter, more defensible model that aligns with how people actually work in 2026.
We are launching Context-Aware eDiscovery now because the industry is ready.
Every corporate legal team I talk to feels the pressure of modern datagrowth:
And frankly, we’re overdue for a shift.
We cannot solve modern problems with pre-cloud tools.
It's time to close the gap between how work happens and how discoveryhappens.
Cloudficient enables Context-Aware eDiscovery by making identity, behavioral, and document context visible and actionable.
Our platforms, Expireon and CaseFusion, were built from day one with context in mind.
They:
Cloudficient is introducing Context-Aware eDiscovery at LegalWeek2026, and this blog marks the start of a broader exploration into the concepts, practices, and tools that will define this category.
The future of eDiscovery isn’t just about collecting less or reviewing faster. It’s about being smarter. It’s about understanding the full story behind the data, not just the files that we extract from it.
Context-Aware eDiscovery is a step forward for the entire industry, and I’m excited to explore it with you in the months ahead.
This article is part of Cloudficient’s Context-Aware eDiscovery™ series leading up to Legalweek 2026.