# Usage: curl -sSL https://seed.show/legal.ediscovery.us | bash -s <install-path>
# <install-path> is the directory where the file should land.

set -euo pipefail
[ -z "${1:-}" ] && {
  echo "install requires a path: curl -sSL https://seed.show/legal.ediscovery.us | bash -s <install-path>" >&2
  exit 1
}
TARGET="$1"
mkdir -p "$TARGET"
DEST="$TARGET/seed-fold.zPX1hf.folded.md"

cat > "$DEST" <<'PORTDOWN_BF1F4833'
<!--
This is a `.folded.md` archive — a directory packed into one markdown
file. The markers below are load-bearing; don't edit them directly.

To unpack:
  1. If your environment lacks bash (Read/Edit only, no shell), stop
     and tell the user this needs `fold` from https://dom.vin/fold —
     you can't proceed yourself.
  2. Install fold once:
       curl -sSL https://dom.vin/fold | bash -s <install-path>
     then unpack:
       <install-path>/scripts/unfold <this-file>
-->

---
fold: true
marker: 9b9b05
at: 2026-05-06T16:23:23Z
root: seed-pack.gI2Xhy
---

<!--fold:9b9b05@file path="README.md" mode="644"-->
# legal.ediscovery.us

US e-discovery context for agents. What e-discovery is actually doing, the federal rules that govern it, and where agents go wrong.

## What e-discovery is actually doing

E-discovery is the process of preserving, collecting, and producing electronically stored information (ESI) that is relevant and not privileged, within proportionality constraints, in response to litigation or a reasonable anticipation of litigation. That is the full job. Every decision in the lifecycle — what to preserve, what to collect, how to process, how to review, what to produce — is measured against that definition.

ESI is not a synonym for "documents." It includes email and attachments, structured data (databases, CRMs), collaboration platforms (Slack, Teams), cloud storage (SharePoint, Google Drive), ephemeral messaging (Signal, WhatsApp), social media, source code, server logs, and metadata embedded in all of the above. The expansion of ESI sources is the central operational challenge in modern e-discovery: custodian identification is harder, preservation is technically complex, and the sheer volume makes human review economically unworkable at scale — which is what drove court acceptance of TAR.

**Proportionality** is the organizing principle. Under FRCP Rule 26(b)(1), the scope of discovery must be proportional to the needs of the case, considering: the importance of the issues at stake in the action, the amount in controversy, the parties' relative access to relevant information, the parties' resources, the importance of the discovery in resolving the issues, and whether the burden or expense of the proposed discovery outweighs its likely benefit. Proportionality is not a shield against legitimate discovery; it is a framework for scoping it. Every e-discovery dispute that makes it to a meet-and-confer or a motion to compel is, at its core, a proportionality argument.

## The FRCP rules that govern it

**Rule 26 — General Provisions Governing Discovery**

Rule 26(b)(1) defines the scope: parties may obtain discovery regarding any nonprivileged matter that is relevant to any party's claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case. Relevance and proportionality are the two-test filter applied to every production request.

Rule 26(b)(3) codifies work-product protection: documents and tangible things prepared in anticipation of litigation or for trial by or for a party or its representative are protected from disclosure unless the opposing party shows substantial need and cannot obtain the equivalent without undue hardship. Opinion work product (counsel's mental impressions, conclusions, opinions, legal theories) receives near-absolute protection.

Rule 26(f) mandates a discovery conference (the "meet and confer" or "Rule 26(f) conference") early in the litigation. The parties must discuss the nature and basis of their claims and defenses, the possibility of settlement, and specifically the form of ESI production, any issues relating to preservation, and any proposed protective order. What is agreed at the Rule 26(f) conference shapes the entire discovery program.

**Rule 34 — Production of Documents and ESI**

Rule 34 governs document requests — the mechanism by which one party demands the other produce ESI. Rule 34 requires production in a form in which the ESI is ordinarily maintained (native format) or in a reasonably usable form. This matters: TIFF images with no extracted text are not necessarily a reasonably usable form for modern review. Native files with metadata preserved are the standard in most commercial litigation.

Rule 34 sets a 30-day default response period (with the ability to state objections within that period and specify when production will actually occur). Objections that do not specify the extent to which the objection is being relied on to withhold documents — i.e., blanket boilerplate objections — are not compliant and can be stricken.

**Rule 37(e) — Failure to Preserve ESI**

Rule 37(e) is the sanctions rule for spoliation of ESI. It was amended in 2015 to create a unified federal standard (before the amendment, circuits diverged sharply). The framework:

- Rule 37(e)(1): If ESI that should have been preserved in anticipation of litigation is lost because a party failed to take reasonable steps to preserve it, and it cannot be restored or replaced through additional discovery, the court may order measures no greater than necessary to cure the prejudice — but only if the loss prejudiced another party.
- Rule 37(e)(2): If the court finds that the party acted with intent to deprive another party of the information's use in litigation, the court may presume the lost information was unfavorable to the party, instruct the jury that it may or must presume the information was unfavorable, or dismiss the action or enter a default judgment.

The intent-to-deprive standard under 37(e)(2) is the threshold for the most severe sanctions. Negligent or even grossly negligent preservation failures may support (e)(1) measures but not (e)(2) terminating sanctions. This distinction is heavily litigated.

## What agents get wrong

**1. Failing to trigger preservation before collection.**
The litigation hold — the written notice to potential custodians directing them to preserve all potentially relevant ESI — must issue before any collection occurs. Collection without a prior hold is not only a workflow error; it is potentially sanctionable if data is lost in the interim. Agents asked to "help with discovery" sometimes jump to collection scoping without asking whether a litigation hold has been issued, who received it, and when. The hold is the legal predicate for everything that follows.

**2. Scope creep in custodian identification.**
Identifying the right custodians — the people likely to have relevant ESI — is the single biggest lever on discovery cost and proportionality. Over-inclusive custodian lists drive exponential cost increases in collection and review. Under-inclusive lists create spoliation risk. The correct process is a structured interview protocol with key witnesses and IT, mapped against the facts at issue, not a reflex of "collect from everyone who was involved." Agents often default to expansive custodian identification without applying the proportionality filter.

**3. Treating all data sources as equivalent.**
Email in an Exchange server, messages in a Slack workspace, records in a Salesforce CRM, and files in an employee's personal Google Drive all have different collection methods, different preservation complexity, different metadata fields, and different authentication requirements at trial. A litigation hold that says "preserve all relevant documents" without specifying how Slack or cloud storage is actually preserved — given those platforms' auto-delete defaults — is a hold that is not being complied with. Agents must account for the technical properties of each data source, not treat ESI as a generic category.

**4. Making privilege determinations without attorney review.**
Attorney-client privilege and work-product protection are legal determinations. Agents can assist with privilege identification — flagging documents that appear to be attorney-client communications, identifying documents prepared in anticipation of litigation — but the privilege call itself requires attorney review. The failure to log withheld privileged documents on a privilege log (with sufficient description for the opposing party to assess the privilege claim) is a waiver risk. Clawback agreements under FRE 502(d) protect against inadvertent production of privileged documents, but they must be in place before production.

**5. Misunderstanding TAR as a black box.**
Technology-assisted review — predictive coding — is not an autonomous decision system. A TAR workflow requires a seed set (a training set of human-reviewed documents), iterative training, validation (sampling to confirm the model is reliably identifying relevant documents), and a defensible protocol that was agreed to or disclosed to opposing counsel. Da Silva Moore v. Publicis Groupe (S.D.N.Y. 2012) and Rio Tinto PLC v. Vale S.A. (S.D.N.Y. 2015) set the standards for transparency. Courts do not accept TAR as a complete substitute for human judgment on close calls, privilege, and responsiveness determinations at the margins.

**6. Ignoring the production format negotiation.**
The Rule 26(f) conference is where the parties negotiate (or fail to negotiate) production format: native files vs. TIFF images vs. PDF, whether metadata fields are required, load file format (IPRO, Relativity), Bates numbering conventions, and whether a protective order is needed before any production occurs. An agent that proceeds to production without confirming the agreed format will produce documents that the receiving party cannot load into their review platform, triggering a reproduced demand.

## The "map not cache" principle

E-discovery law is active. Rule 37(e) was substantially revised in 2015. Emerging issues include: AI-assisted review in GenAI-supplemented workflows (beyond TAR), ESI from ephemeral and mobile-native platforms, cross-border data transfer constraints (GDPR intersecting with US discovery obligations), and the evolving standard for producing AI-generated documents. Fetch sources.md for live court rules, EDRM guidance, and Sedona Conference principles rather than relying on training data.
<!--fold:9b9b05@file path="sources.md" mode="644"-->
# sources

Fetch these at task time. Ordered by importance. These are live authoritative references — do not rely on training data for e-discovery rules, court standards, or TAR acceptance criteria.

## Federal rules

**FRCP Rule 26 — General Provisions Governing Discovery** — The full text of Rule 26 at Cornell LII, including Rule 26(b)(1) (scope and proportionality), Rule 26(b)(3) (work-product protection), and Rule 26(f) (meet-and-confer requirements). The 2015 amendments to proportionality language are operative.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_26

**FRCP Rule 34 — Producing Documents, ESI, and Tangible Things** — The mechanism for document requests, including the "reasonably usable form" standard for ESI production and the requirement that objections specify the extent to which they are being relied upon.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_34

**FRCP Rule 37 — Failure to Make Disclosures or to Cooperate in Discovery** — Including Rule 37(e), the 2015-amended ESI spoliation and sanctions framework. The threshold distinction between 37(e)(1) (prejudice-based measures) and 37(e)(2) (intent-to-deprive sanctions) is here.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_37

## EDRM and industry frameworks

**EDRM — Electronic Discovery Reference Model** — The standard lifecycle framework for e-discovery: information governance, identification, preservation, collection, processing, review, analysis, production, and presentation. The EDRM also publishes standards for XML data exchange, data volumes, and TAR validation.
https://edrm.net/

**EDRM Data Set and Model Orders** — EDRM model ESI protocols, production specifications, and stipulated protective orders that parties can adapt for use in federal litigation. Useful when negotiating Rule 26(f) production format terms.
https://edrm.net/resources/frameworks-and-standards/edrm-model-orders/

## Sedona Conference

**The Sedona Conference Cooperation Proclamation** — The foundational statement that cooperation in discovery is consistent with zealous representation. Widely cited by courts as the standard for discovery conduct.
https://thesedonaconference.org/publication/The_Sedona_Conference_Cooperation_Proclamation

**The Sedona Principles, Third Edition (2017)** — The authoritative guidance on best practices for ESI in US litigation. Fourteen principles covering proportionality, preservation, spoliation, form of production, and TAR. Courts cite these regularly.
https://thesedonaconference.org/publication/The%20Sedona%20Principles

**Sedona Conference Commentary on TAR** — The Sedona Conference's guidance specifically on technology-assisted review: what a defensible TAR protocol requires, validation methods, and transparency obligations. The companion to Da Silva Moore and Rio Tinto in understanding court expectations.
https://thesedonaconference.org/publication/Sedona_Conference_Commentary_on_Assisted_Review

## Key court decisions on TAR acceptance

**Da Silva Moore v. Publicis Groupe, No. 11 Civ. 1279, 2012 WL 607412 (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 24, 2012)** — The first federal court decision approving TAR/predictive coding as an appropriate review methodology. Judge Peck's opinion set the standard for transparency: the producing party must disclose its TAR protocol and work cooperatively with the requesting party. This decision opened the door to court-supervised TAR programs.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2011cv01279/380914/138/

**Rio Tinto PLC v. Vale S.A., 306 F.R.D. 125 (S.D.N.Y. 2015)** — Judge Peck's follow-on opinion extending TAR acceptance beyond transparent, cooperative protocols to adversarial settings. The decision established that parties need not disclose seed sets to opposing counsel as a matter of course, provided the producing party can demonstrate validation. The operative standard for commercial TAR deployments.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2014mc00033/427200/16/

**Hyles v. New York City, No. 10 Civ. 3119 (AT)(AJP), 2016 WL 4077114 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 1, 2016)** — Establishes that a party cannot be forced to use TAR over its objection. The requesting party can demand TAR but cannot compel it. The decision also clarifies that keyword search, though less effective than TAR statistically, remains a permissible methodology.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2010cv03119/362359/98/

## Privilege and FRE 502

**FRE 502 — Attorney-Client Privilege and Work Product; Limitations on Waiver** — The federal rule governing inadvertent disclosure. Rule 502(d) allows parties to obtain a court order protecting against privilege waiver from inadvertent production — the clawback order. Must be negotiated and entered before production to be effective. The full text is at Cornell LII.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_502

## ILTA and practitioner resources

**ILTA (International Legal Technology Association) — E-Discovery Resources** — Practitioner community resources on e-discovery technology, TAR workflows, vendor selection, and case law updates. Relevant for understanding what tools (Relativity, Nuix, Reveal) are doing operationally.
https://www.iltanet.org/communities/community-home?CommunityKey=ac5bf08f-df60-4b53-8a4e-73b48f91e50e

**Exterro E-Discovery & Privacy Law** — Regularly updated case law tracker and practical guidance on e-discovery sanctions, preservation obligations, and emerging ESI issues. Useful for current developments beyond training data.
https://www.exterro.com/e-discovery-software/e-discovery-resources/

## Emerging AI in e-discovery

**FTI Technology — AI and E-Discovery** — Industry practitioner perspective on GenAI-supplemented review workflows — the shift from TAR (predictive coding) to LLM-assisted review, and the open questions about validation, defensibility, and privilege screening.
https://www.fticonsulting.com/insights/articles/artificial-intelligence-ediscovery
<!--fold:9b9b05@file path="workflow.md" mode="644"-->
# workflow

The EDRM lifecycle as a decision framework. Each stage has legal and technical decision points that must be resolved before the next stage begins. Proportionality applies at every stage — not just at the start.

## 1. Information Governance

**What it is:** The pre-litigation program for managing ESI — retention policies, data maps, disposition schedules, legal hold infrastructure. Most organizations have gaps here that become expensive when litigation arrives.

**Key decision points:**
- Does the organization have a data map identifying where ESI lives (email servers, cloud storage, collaboration platforms, structured databases)?
- Are retention policies defensible — consistent, documented, and actually followed?
- Is there infrastructure to issue and track litigation holds, or does preservation require manual outreach each time?

**Why it matters for discovery:** Defensible information governance is the difference between a routine legal hold and an emergency data recovery exercise. If auto-deletion policies were running on Slack or Google Drive before the hold issued, the resulting spoliation exposure falls on the organization.

---

## 2. Identification

**What it is:** Determining what ESI potentially exists that is relevant to the matter — custodians, data sources, date ranges, key terms.

**Key decision points:**
- Who are the key custodians? (Apply proportionality: over-inclusive custodian lists multiply collection and review costs exponentially.)
- What data sources do each custodian have? Email, Slack, Teams, personal cloud storage, mobile devices, CRM access?
- What is the relevant date range?
- Are there non-custodial data sources — shared drives, databases, server logs — that hold relevant ESI independent of individual custodians?

**Proportionality checkpoint:** The identification phase is where proportionality arguments are won or lost. A court that sees a custodian list of 80 people for a breach of contract dispute will question whether collection from all 80 is proportional to the amount in controversy. Narrow early; document the rationale.

**What agents get wrong:** Defaulting to "identify everyone who touched the matter" without filtering against the specific claims and defenses. The proportionality test requires matching custodians to facts, not to organizational charts.

---

## 3. Preservation (Litigation Hold)

**What it is:** The formal mechanism for suspending normal deletion and retention processes for ESI that is potentially relevant to anticipated or actual litigation. A written litigation hold notice issues to identified custodians directing them to preserve all potentially relevant ESI.

**Key decision points:**
- Has the litigation hold issued before any collection? (Collection without a prior hold is a sequencing error that creates spoliation risk.)
- Who received the hold, and when? (Custodian receipt and acknowledgment should be documented.)
- Does the hold address platform-specific preservation requirements? A hold that says "preserve your emails" without addressing Slack auto-deletion, Google Drive purge settings, or mobile device backup policies is not being complied with in substance.
- Is there a hold tracking system, or are holds managed by manual email chains? (Manual processes create gaps in repeat custodian holds.)
- Are litigation hold notices being reissued when the matter materially develops or the custodian list expands?

**Rule 37(e) exposure:** Sanctions for ESI loss require a showing that the party failed to take reasonable steps to preserve. A documented litigation hold issued promptly, with custodian acknowledgment and platform-specific instructions, is the core evidence of reasonable steps. Without it, the analysis under 37(e)(1) (prejudice-based measures) and 37(e)(2) (intent-to-deprive sanctions) is much harder to defend.

**Proportionality checkpoint:** Preservation scope should track identification scope. If the custodian list narrows during identification, the hold should be updated. Over-preserving creates downstream collection and review cost without legal benefit.

---

## 4. Collection

**What it is:** The technical process of gathering ESI from the identified sources in a forensically defensible manner — maintaining metadata integrity, chain of custody, and auditability.

**Key decision points:**
- Is collection being performed or supervised by a qualified e-discovery professional (in-house or vendor)?
- Are native file formats being preserved (rather than printed-to-PDF or screenshot collected)?
- Is metadata being captured — including system metadata (created/modified dates, author fields) and email metadata (to/from/cc/bcc, send dates)?
- Is the collection defensible against a motion challenging authenticity? (Chain of custody documentation matters at trial.)
- For cloud and SaaS platforms: are the APIs being used for collection, or is collection relying on manual export? (Manual exports often strip metadata.)
- For mobile devices: is collection from the device or from a cloud backup? What messaging apps are present?

**Platform-specific issues:**
- **Slack/Teams:** Messages have channel, thread, and reaction metadata. Collection via export (not API) often loses threading context. Slack's free tier has a 90-day message retention limit that may have already deleted relevant messages before the hold issued.
- **Google Workspace / Microsoft 365:** Admin-level collection tools (Google Vault, Microsoft Purview) are the standard; user-initiated exports are not defensible for litigation collection.
- **Mobile devices:** iCloud or Google backups may hold messages not available on the device itself. Third-party messaging apps (Signal, WhatsApp) have separate backup and encryption considerations.

---

## 5. Processing

**What it is:** Converting collected ESI into a reviewable format — deduplication, near-duplicate identification, email threading, format normalization, extraction of text and metadata, loading into a review platform (Relativity, Nuix, Reveal, etc.).

**Key decision points:**
- What is the agreed production format? (Negotiate in the Rule 26(f) conference: native, TIFF+OCR, PDF, or hybrid.) Processing choices must align with the agreed production format.
- What deduplication methodology will be used — global dedup (across all custodians) or custodial dedup (within each custodian)? Global dedup is more aggressive; the choice affects production volume and may require disclosure to opposing counsel.
- How will near-duplicates and email families be handled? Splitting an email from its attachment is generally not defensible.
- What metadata fields will be extracted and included in the load file?

**Processing is where format disputes become irreversible.** If the agreed format is native but the processing vendor converts everything to TIFF, the metadata is gone. If the load file does not include the required metadata fields, the production may need to be reproduced. Confirm processing specs against the Rule 26(f) agreement before running.

---

## 6. Review

**What it is:** The most resource-intensive phase — determining responsiveness, identifying privilege, and applying issue coding to documents before production. Review is where TAR (technology-assisted review) / predictive coding has transformed the economics of large-scale discovery.

### Linear (Manual) Review

Traditional attorney review: reviewers assess each document individually for responsiveness, privilege, and issue coding. Cost is roughly proportional to document volume — economically unworkable at scale in modern ESI collections. Still appropriate for small matters and for privilege review at the document level.

### TAR Workflow: Seed Set → Training → Validation → Production Cutoff

**TAR (technology-assisted review)** — also called predictive coding or CAL (continuous active learning) — uses a machine learning model trained on human-reviewed documents to predict responsiveness across the full document population.

**Stage 1: Seed set construction**
A senior attorney reviews a set of documents (the seed set) and codes them for responsiveness. The seed set quality drives model accuracy. Seed sets should be representative of the document population, not drawn only from obvious hot documents.

**Stage 2: Model training**
The review platform trains a relevance model on the coded seed set. Initial training rounds produce a relevance score for each document in the population.

**Stage 3: Iterative training and validation**
The model is retrained iteratively as more documents are reviewed. Validation uses statistical sampling — reviewing a random sample of documents the model scores as non-responsive to confirm the model is not suppressing relevant documents above a defensible error rate. The standard for validation is elusion testing: measuring the rate at which the model is eliding (missing) relevant documents in the presumptively non-responsive population.

**Stage 4: Production cutoff**
When validation confirms the model meets the agreed error tolerance (typically <5% elusion for the non-responsive population), the producing party applies a relevance cutoff — documents scoring above the threshold are reviewed for privilege before production; documents scoring below the threshold are withheld as non-responsive.

**Key legal and technical decision points:**
- What review platform and TAR methodology are being used? (Active learning, continuous active learning (CAL), and simple passive learning models have different training protocols and defensibility profiles.)
- Has the TAR protocol been disclosed to opposing counsel? Da Silva Moore requires transparency; Rio Tinto clarifies the seed set itself need not be produced, but the protocol must be defensible.
- What is the agreed validation methodology and error tolerance?
- Is TAR being used for responsiveness, privilege, or both? Courts accept TAR for responsiveness; privilege screening requires attorney review of the TAR-identified potentially privileged documents regardless.

**Proportionality checkpoint:** TAR is itself a proportionality tool. A producing party that refuses TAR for a large document population when TAR would dramatically reduce review cost is likely to face a proportionality argument.

### Privilege Review

Privilege review runs parallel to or after responsiveness review. Documents identified as potentially privileged — attorney-client communications, documents prepared in anticipation of litigation — require attorney review to confirm the privilege and document the basis for withholding.

**Key decision points:**
- Is a FRE 502(d) clawback order in place? (Must be entered before production to protect against inadvertent disclosure waiver. Negotiate at the Rule 26(f) conference.)
- Are withheld documents being logged on a privilege log? The log must describe the document with sufficient particularity for the opposing party to assess the privilege claim: date, author, recipients, subject matter (without revealing the privileged content), and the privilege basis.
- Are communications with non-attorney business personnel being correctly analyzed? Not every email that copies in-house counsel is privileged — the communication must be made for the purpose of seeking or providing legal advice, not business advice.

---

## 7. Production

**What it is:** Delivering the responsive, non-privileged documents to the requesting party in the agreed format.

**Key decision points:**
- Does the production format match the Rule 26(f) agreement? (Native files, TIFF with extracted text, PDF, or as-maintained format.)
- Are required metadata fields included in the load file?
- Is Bates numbering applied correctly and sequentially?
- Is the privilege log complete and produced simultaneously with the document production?
- Has the FRE 502(d) order been entered before production begins?
- Is a cover letter or production letter identifying volumes, Bates ranges, custodians, and search terms included?

**Reproductions are avoidable.** Most reproductions result from a failure to nail down the production format specification before processing and review begin. By the time the first production is due, renegotiating format is expensive and produces schedule disruptions. Front-load the format negotiation in the Rule 26(f) conference.

---

## 8. Presentation

**What it is:** Using ESI at depositions, in motions, and at trial — authentication, admissibility, and effective use of ESI as evidence.

**Key decision points:**
- Is the chain of custody documentation sufficient to authenticate collected ESI at trial?
- Are metadata fields being used correctly to establish authenticity (creation dates, author fields)?
- Have any produced documents been processed in a way that affects admissibility (e.g., TIFF conversion stripping metadata that would authenticate the document)?
- Are there native file authenticity issues for structured data (database exports, spreadsheets with calculated fields)?

---

## Cross-cutting: proportionality at every stage

Proportionality is not a one-time gate at the beginning of discovery. It applies at each stage:

| Stage | Proportionality question |
|-------|--------------------------|
| Identification | Is the custodian list scoped to the claims and defenses, not the organizational chart? |
| Preservation | Is the hold scope matched to the identification scope, or has it grown by inertia? |
| Collection | Are collection methods appropriate to the matter size — or is forensic imaging being used where targeted export would suffice? |
| Review | Is TAR appropriate given the document population? Is manual review of a 500,000-document population proportional to the amount in controversy? |
| Production | Is the production format negotiated to minimize unnecessary processing cost on both sides? |

A motion to compel and a proportionality objection are often mirror images: the requesting party argues the burden is outweighed by the likely benefit; the producing party argues it is not. Document the proportionality analysis at each stage so those arguments can be made from a record.
<!--fold:9b9b05@end-->
PORTDOWN_BF1F4833

# ── post ──
MARKER=$(awk '/^---$/ { f++; if (f==2) exit; next } f==1 && /^marker:[[:space:]]/ { sub(/^marker:[[:space:]]+/, ""); print; exit }' "$DEST")
[ -z "$MARKER" ] && { echo "seed: archive has no marker — corrupt" >&2; exit 1; }
awk -v m="$MARKER" -v outdir="$TARGET" '
  BEGIN {
    # Match <!--fold:<m>@file path="X"--> with an optional mode attr after
    # the path (fold emits  mode="644"  on executables).
    file_re = "^<!--fold:" m "@file path=\"([^\"]+)\"( mode=\"[0-9]+\")?-->$"
    end_re  = "^<!--fold:" m "@end-->$"
  }
  $0 ~ end_re { if (current) close(current); exit }
  $0 ~ file_re {
    if (current) close(current)
    line = $0
    sub(/^<!--fold:[^@]+@file path="/, "", line); sub(/".*$/, "", line)
    current = outdir "/" line
    dir = current; sub(/\/[^\/]*$/, "", dir)
    if (dir != current) system("mkdir -p \"" dir "\"")
    printf "" > current
    next
  }
  current { print >> current }
' "$DEST"
SEED_EXTRACTED=$(find "$TARGET" -type f -not -path "$DEST" 2>/dev/null | wc -l)
if [ "$SEED_EXTRACTED" = "0" ]; then
  echo "seed: archive contained no files — refusing to delete the source" >&2
  echo "  archive preserved at: $DEST" >&2
  exit 1
fi
rm -f "$DEST"

echo "" >&2
echo "✓ seed unpacked → $TARGET ($SEED_EXTRACTED files)" >&2
find "$TARGET" -type f | sort | while IFS= read -r _sf; do
  echo "  ${_sf#${TARGET}/}" >&2
done
echo "" >&2
if [ -f "$TARGET/SKILL.md" ]; then
  echo "This seed contains a skill (SKILL.md). Install it in your agent's skills directory." >&2
  echo "" >&2
fi
echo "Install the seed skill if not already installed:" >&2
echo "  https://seed.show/skill" >&2
echo "" >&2
echo "Publisher prompt:" >&2
sed 's/^/  /' >&2 <<'__SEED_PROMPT_END_AC1F2B__'
You have the US e-discovery context. Read README.md for the discovery mental model and FRCP constraints, workflow.md for the EDRM lifecycle. Fetch sources.md for court rules and authoritative guidance. To share your own context bundles: curl seed.show/skill | bash
__SEED_PROMPT_END_AC1F2B__
exit 0