ICE kicks off its search for eDiscovery software
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By
Ross Wilkers
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement embarks on this effort to support its staff of 2,300 attorneys and 350 support personnel that handle large volumes of cases and related data.
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has started to look at the landscape of cloud-native electronic discovery software tools to aid its office responsible for handling legal, regulatory and compliance matters.
ICE is launching this effort to aid its Office of the Principal Legal Advisor, which staffs 2,300 attorneys and 350 support personnel that handle large volumes of cases and related data. This office acts as the government’s sole representative in immigration removal proceedings before the Executive Office for Immigration Review.
Artificial intelligence and agentic AI functions are a must for ICE in its search for a commercially-available software-as-a-service platform that can support the full lifecycle of electronic discovery, the agency said in a Monday sources sought notice.
The notice cites potential use cases for the platform as including litigation, investigations, administrative proceedings, Freedom of Information Act-related cases, regulatory matters, congressional inquiries, and other discovery or compliance activities.
ICE’s desired specs for the platform include natural language and semantic search, automated summarization, AI-assisted review and coding, contextual analysis, and agents that can carry out and coordinate multi-step discovery workflows.
The request for information also spells out how the platform should cover information governance and legal holds from initial data collection work to the processing, review, analysis and production stages.
ICE is asking submissions to be sent in the form of white papers that include a capability narrative and responses to functional requirements in AI, agentic AI, governance response structures and questions surrounding the standard Electronic Discovery Reference Model framework.
George Socha and Tom Gelbmann developed EDRM in 2005 to standardize how legal, technical and compliance teams handle electronically-stored information during litigation and investigations.
Responses to the RFI are due by 2 p.m. Eastern time on Oct. 28.
All throughout the RFI, ICE uses the term “Super Intelligence” to comply with President Trump’s September executive order mandating agencies use the SI terminology in official communications.