The Sedona Principles and Cooperation

When organizations face litigation, the way they identify, preserve, and produce electronically stored information (ESI) is rarely improvised in the moment. It rests on choices made long before a complaint is filed: how records are classified, retained, and disposed of in the ordinary course of business. The Sedona Principles connect those everyday information-governance decisions to the obligations that arise in discovery, offering a shared vocabulary for what reasonable, defensible conduct looks like when electronic information becomes evidence.

The Sedona Conference is a nonpartisan research and educational institute whose working groups publish consensus commentary on complex areas of law, including electronic discovery. Two of its most influential outputs are The Sedona Principles, addressing the production of ESI, and The Cooperation Proclamation, which reframes discovery as a collaborative rather than purely adversarial exercise. Neither is binding law, but courts and practitioners cite them widely because they distill practical guidance from the realities of managing information at scale. For records professionals, they translate abstract legal duties into governance practices that can be designed in advance.

What the Sedona Principles Address

The Sedona Principles are a set of guiding statements on the preservation, search, review, and production of ESI. Rather than prescribing a single technical method, they articulate expectations that flow from reasonableness and good faith. Several themes recur across the principles:

• The producing party generally knows its own systems best. Because an organization understands its own data sources, formats, and retention practices, it is ordinarily best positioned to choose appropriate methods for preserving and searching that information, subject to reasonableness.
• Not all ESI is equally accessible or relevant. The principles recognize that some information is costly or burdensome to retrieve, and that the scope of discovery should account for that reality rather than demanding everything that technically exists.
• Reasonable, good-faith processes matter more than perfection. A defensible approach is one that is documented, proportionate, and consistently applied, not one that guarantees the recovery of every conceivable file.

These ideas have proven durable because they describe how information actually behaves: distributed across systems, generated in enormous volume, and varying widely in business value. They reward organizations that have invested in disciplined records management before a dispute arises.

The Duty to Cooperate

The Cooperation Proclamation advances a simple but consequential premise: the discovery phase functions best when opposing parties cooperate on process, even while they contest the merits. Cooperation in this sense does not mean conceding legal positions. It means engaging transparently about how ESI will be identified and produced, narrowing disagreements early, and avoiding gamesmanship that inflates cost and delay.

In practice, cooperation is expressed through candid discussions about the sources of relevant data, the search terms or analytics to be used, the formats for production, and the timing of exchanges. When parties align on these mechanics up front, they reduce the motion practice and satellite disputes that can overwhelm a case. Courts increasingly view a refusal to engage in good-faith cooperation as itself a problem, distinct from any underlying disagreement about what is discoverable.

Proportionality as the Organizing Principle

Cooperation and proportionality reinforce one another. Proportionality asks whether the burden or expense of a given discovery effort is justified by its likely benefit, weighed against the stakes of the case, the parties’ resources, and the importance of the information to resolving the issues. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure embed proportionality directly into the scope of discovery, and the Sedona materials elaborate on how to apply it sensibly.

For records and information-governance professionals, proportionality is a powerful concept because it links directly to retention discipline. An organization that retains only what it needs, disposes of transitory material under a defensible schedule, and can describe its data landscape clearly is far better equipped to make and defend proportionality arguments. Cooperation gives the parties a forum to apply proportionality jointly rather than litigating it after the fact.

Connecting Discovery to Records Management

The Sedona framework rewards good governance practiced long before litigation. Sound recordkeeping standards, such as ISO 15489-1, emphasize that records should be authentic, reliable, and managed through their lifecycle with clear retention and disposition rules. These same qualities make ESI easier to find, defensibly limit, and produce when discovery arrives.

Key governance practices that support cooperation and proportionality include:

• Defensible retention schedules that justify why information is kept or disposed of, applied consistently and documented.
• Reliable legal hold processes that suspend disposition when litigation is reasonably anticipated, with clear triggers and audit trails.
• A current understanding of data sources so the organization can describe where relevant information resides and how accessible it is.
• Documented, repeatable methods for search and review that can withstand scrutiny without claiming perfection.

When these practices are in place, an organization can enter discovery prepared to cooperate substantively rather than scrambling to reconstruct what it has. Information governance and litigation readiness become two views of the same well-managed information estate. You can explore related material in the information governance topic hub.

Standards, Tools, and Evolving Practice

The Sedona materials sit within a broader landscape of standards that continues to evolve. Where older specifications once dominated electronic records management procurement, federal practice has shifted: the National Archives discontinued its endorsement of the DoD 5015.2 standard in 2022, moving instead toward the Universal Electronic Records Management Requirements and the Federal Electronic Records Modernization Initiative. The underlying lesson for cooperation is the same. Frameworks and tools change, but the obligation to manage information reasonably, transparently, and proportionately endures.

For practitioners, the Sedona Principles and the Cooperation Proclamation are best understood not as rules to memorize but as a mindset to adopt. They encourage organizations to treat discovery as a process to be managed cooperatively, grounded in everyday records discipline, and measured against proportionality rather than against an unattainable standard of completeness. That mindset reduces cost and risk while improving the quality of information available to resolve disputes on their merits.