What is electronically stored information (ESI)?

Electronically stored information (ESI) is the legal term — from the rules of civil procedure — for any information in digital form that could be relevant to litigation or an investigation. It’s the subject matter of e-discovery.

What counts as ESI

ESI is broad. It includes:

• Email and calendar items
• Documents, spreadsheets, presentations
• Databases and structured system data
• Instant messages, chat (Teams/Slack), and text messages
• Social media, voicemail, and other digital communications
• Metadata — the data about the data (who, when, edits) — which is itself often discoverable

In short, if it’s digital and could be relevant, it’s likely ESI.

Why it matters

When litigation is reasonably anticipated, relevant ESI must be preserved (via a litigation hold), then collected, reviewed, and produced to the other side. Failing to preserve relevant ESI is spoliation, which courts can sanction severely.

Because ESI is voluminous, easily duplicated, and metadata-rich, it dominates modern discovery — and review (the costliest stage) scales with how much ESI there is. That’s the direct link to records management: organizations that dispose of ROT on schedule and keep records findable have less ESI to wade through and can locate the relevant material reliably, cutting e-discovery cost and risk. Organizations drowning in unmanaged data face the opposite.

The takeaway

ESI is just “digital information that might matter in a dispute.” Managing it well day to day — retention, disposition, findability, and reliable holds — is what makes the inevitable e-discovery manageable rather than a crisis. See e-discovery and information governance for more.