Once you establish the strategic groundwork for data migration, your focus should shift to execution. This is where the real complexity begins. Migrating eDiscovery data is not as simple as moving files from one system to another. It involves translating years of legal work product, preserving defensibility, and accommodating technical differences between platforms that were never designed to speak the same language.
By understanding the most common technical pitfalls organizations face during data migrations, your team can identify challenges early, plan accordingly, and avoid costly rework and data integrity failures.
Preserving Work Product: Searches, Reports, and Tags
One of the most frequently underestimated challenges in eDiscovery data migrations is the transfer of work product. These are the searches, tags, reports, and metadata structures that legal teams rely on to manage their matters. Unlike documents and native files, work product does not always export cleanly or translate easily between platforms.
Boolean logic may be interpreted differently across systems. Folder hierarchies may not align. User permissions and access roles may need to be rebuilt from scratch. Without a deliberate mapping strategy, the result is a fragmented or unusable set of tools on the new platform, leading to inefficiencies and lost institutional knowledge.
To mitigate this risk, you should inventory all saved searches, tagging conventions, saved reports, and user roles before the migration begins. Where direct mapping is not possible, equivalent functionality should be documented and recreated in the new environment with input from the legal teams who use it most.
Understanding Hashing Differences and Deduplication Impact
Another area where platform differences can quietly undermine a migration is in how systems handle cryptographic hashing such as MD5, SHA-1, or SHA-256. Hash values are commonly used to identify duplicate files, but not all platforms calculate these values in the same way. Some generate hashes based purely on file content, while others incorporate metadata like file path, filename, or custodian.
This discrepancy can result in unexpected behavior. Files that were previously deduplicated may reappear as duplicates. Other files may be incorrectly treated as identical. False positives and false negatives in deduplication workflows can lead to over-collection, under-review, or inconsistent productions.
To avoid these issues, you must first understand the hashing logic used by both your current and target platforms. Performing test migrations on controlled datasets can reveal discrepancies early. Any change to deduplication methodology should be documented, and defensibility should be reviewed with legal teams before applying new standards across matters.
Maintaining Production History and Integrity
While issues with hashing and deduplication often affect the internal logic of the data, they can also have external consequences. When those inconsistencies extend into production sets, which can be one of the most fragile assets during an eDiscovery data migration, the stakes become even higher. Because productions are frequently reused, referenced, or challenged in ongoing matters, even minor discrepancies can compromise their legal defensibility.
Key elements such as Bates numbers, redactions, privilege logs, and load files must transfer exactly as they were originally produced. Even minor changes like renamed folders or reformatted filenames can break the links between original and redacted versions or create inconsistencies in what was disclosed. Incompatible load file formats can further disrupt downstream processing.
To protect production integrity, you should validate that the destination platform can accommodate the formats used in past productions. In some cases, manually reloading production files may be the most reliable option. Extensive quality control and side-by-side comparisons should be standard practice during this phase.
Ensuring File System Integrity and Permissions
Beyond documents and work product, many eDiscovery environments contain system-level artifacts that must be considered during migration. These include audit logs, active learning models, production set details, and permission settings tied to folder structures.
Files stored in nonstandard locations or shared drives may be excluded from migration if permissions are not correctly configured. Processing exclusions, such as date filters or unsupported file types, may inadvertently omit important content unless explicitly addressed.
A file system audit should be conducted prior to migration to identify any non-obvious data sources. Permissions must be reviewed to ensure full access, and any processing rules should be evaluated to confirm they align with current review or compliance requirements.
Validating Infrastructure Readiness
Even the most carefully planned migration can be derailed by inadequate technical infrastructure. Migrating terabytes of legal data requires high-speed storage, sufficient network bandwidth, and reliable backup systems to avoid bottlenecks. If an outage occurs during migration, it can delay timelines and increase costs.
You must confirm that your target environment has the necessary hardware and software capacity to receive and manage the volume of data being moved. In cases where migration is driven by cost savings, a thorough cost-benefit analysis should be completed to ensure that the destination platform delivers the expected value without sacrificing functionality or stability.
Just as importantly, your data migration team should include experienced eDiscovery analysts and developers who understand the nuances of legal data. Off-the-shelf tools or regular IT teams may not be equipped to manage the custom handling and conversion tasks that eDiscovery often demands.
Aligning Deduplication and Production Specifications
Finally, before concluding any eDiscovery data migration, you must revisit your deduplication and production settings in the new environment. If the destination platform uses different deduplication logic or scope, existing datasets may no longer align with newly ingested data.
This is especially important for active matters where additional documents may be added after the migration is complete. Consistency in deduplication and production protocols is essential to maintaining continuity and defensibility.
Be sure to review your production specifications and determine whether adjustments to load file structure, metadata fields, or deduplication scope are needed. These changes should be communicated to outside counsel or service providers to prevent misalignment in future productions.
Conclusion
The technical phase of an eDiscovery data migration is where plans meet execution, and small oversights can have outsized consequences. Each challenge, from mismatched hash values to broken productions, represents a potential risk to efficiency, continuity, or legal defensibility. By addressing these issues methodically and aligning technical decisions with the strategic goals laid out during the planning phase, you can reduce disruption and ensure that the data you move is not only intact, but litigation ready.
Yet even with strong technical execution, the question remains: how should that execution be structured? Whether migration occurs in a single event or unfolds over time, the way the process is organized can determine how successful it ultimately becomes. Defensibility, user disruption, system overlap, and long-term maintainability all hinge on the approach chosen for getting from one environment to the next.
Joey Adams
Author
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Joey Adams leads TCDI’s Systems Operations team, which is responsible for the day-to-day technical management of the company’s client-facing software. Since joining TCDI in 2001, Joey has held a range of roles from software development and implementation engineering to project management, on-site client support, and database administration.
Today, his team handles everything from software installations and second-level support to the technical aspects of data migrations. With more than two decades of industry experience, Joey brings a deep understanding of legal technology infrastructure and a hands-on approach to ensuring reliable, high-performing systems for TCDI’s clients. Learn more about Joey >
