The eDiscovery Demo Checklist

1. Who Is This Checklist for?

‍Legal operations leaders, in-house legal teams, litigation support professionals, eDiscovery managers, paralegals, and IT or security stakeholders sitting in on vendor demos. Anyone responsible for choosing an eDiscovery platform, or for living with the one that gets chosen.

2. How Do I Use It During a Live Demo?

‍Print one sheet per vendor and score each of the twenty asks as it happens, 2 for proved live on realistic data, 1 for partial or canned, 0 for described or deferred. Complete the summary page within an hour of the session, before three demos blur into one.

3. What Are the Twenty Asks Actually Testing?

‍Behavior, not claims. Live processing on mixed data, exception handling, TAR validation numbers, AI override logging, native redaction, audit trail speed, permission scoping, deployment parity, your own team driving the keyboard, and whether the vendor can price the session they just ran.

4. Why Does the Checklist Track Evasion Separately?

‍Because how a vendor dodges is often the real answer. Throughput quoted with nothing running, validation given in adjectives, hard questions answered with the roadmap. One instance is noise. Three ticks is a pattern worth recording against the vendor's score.

5. Should Demos Happen Before or After an RFP?

‍After, when you can. Written answers put every claim on the record, and finalist demos then verify those claims live. The checklist has a line for flagging each vendor's two weakest written sections for an on-screen response.

6. Does This Replace a Proof of Concept?

‍No. A demo is vendor-led inside an environment the vendor controls. A proof of concept puts your team on the keyboard with your own sample data. Use the checklist to narrow finalists, then use a proof of concept to settle the decision.

‍