In my previous post, I introduced Context-Aware eDiscovery™ and the idea that modern eDiscovery tools are increasingly misaligned with how work happens today.
In this post, I want to go deeper into the core problem that makes that misalignment so dangerous: the context gap.
Because the hardest questions legal teams are asked to answer today are no longer about what files exist.
They’re about what actually happened.
When lawyers, regulators, or investigators ask questions, they’re rarely asking about files in isolation. They’re asking things like:
Traditional eDiscovery workflows are poorly equipped to answer those questions because they treat evidence as static artifacts. Detached from the environment in which they were created, shared, and used. That gap between the artifact and the reality around it is what I call the context gap.
Most enterprises today are not lacking data. Quite the opposite.
They have:
The problem is that none of this information is brought together in a way that supports legal reasoning.
Instead, we flatten everything into files and messages and then ask those artifacts to carry the full burden of explanation. And they simply cannot.
The earliest, and most consequential place the context gap appears in is during identification.
We identify custodians based on:
But modern work doesn’t respect those boundaries.
People:
When we identify custodians as they exist today, rather than as they existed during the relevant period, we introduce silent risk before preservation ever begins.
And once identification is wrong, everything downstream inherits that error.
A document can tell you what was written.
It cannot tell you:
In cloud collaboration environments, behavior, not ownership, is often the best indicator of relevance.
Yet most eDiscovery tools still treat ownership as the primary signal.
That mismatch is a structural flaw, not a workflow mistake.
When teams sense uncertainty, they compensate by collecting more.
When context is missing, teams collect defensively because they don’t trust their own scoping decisions.
But collecting everything doesn’t restore context, it just obscures it further.
One of the most dangerous aspects of the context gap is that context decays over time.
By the time a legal or regulatory matter arises, the context needed to explain past actions is often already gone.
Traditional eDiscovery starts after this loss has occurred.
Context-Aware eDiscovery™ assumes that waiting is the mistake.
Context-Aware eDiscovery™ starts from a different premise:
If we want to explain what happened later, we need to preserve and understand context as it exists today.
That means treating the following as first-class inputs, not afterthoughts:
When context is captured and verified early, everything changes:
Context-Aware eDiscovery™ is not about reconstructing the past with omniscience.
Courts don’t require perfection. They require proportional reasonableness.
Context doesn’t eliminate judgment, it supports it.
What’s unreasonable today is pretending that files alone can explain modern work.
The gap between how work happens and how discovery works is widening.
As collaboration becomes more dynamic, shared, and distributed, the cost of missing context grows. Not just financially, but legally, and the data your employees are creating today will become discoverable ESI tomorrow.
Context-Aware eDiscovery™ exists because the old model no longer holds.
And in the next post, I’ll explain why Identification, not collection or review, is the real center of gravity in modern eDiscovery.
This article is part of Cloudficient’s Context-Aware eDiscovery™ series leading up to Legalweek.