PD 57AD in 2026: what the latest Disclosure Pilot changes mean for eDiscovery

Practice Direction 57AD has been the standing disclosure regime in the Business and Property Courts since 2022, replacing the original Disclosure Pilot Scheme. In 2026 it remains the framework that shapes how parties, solicitors and providers approach disclosure in commercial litigation - and the courts continue to test its limits in reported decisions.

Where the regime sits today

The headline structure is unchanged: parties exchange a Disclosure Review Document, agree Issues for Disclosure, and choose between Models A to E for each issue. Extended Disclosure (Models C, D and E) requires the court to be satisfied that the request is reasonable and proportionate, and the parties to engage substantively with each other on scope before the first Case Management Conference. The full PD remains available on the justice.gov.uk rules portal.

What practitioners are seeing in 2026

Three things are increasingly visible in the way the courts respond to disclosure applications:

• Less tolerance for boilerplate scope. Where a party seeks broad Model D disclosure on every issue, judges are pressing for a real explanation of why narrower searches will not work.
• Earlier engagement on data sources. The DRD has become the place where the existence of Slack, Teams, WhatsApp and similar collaboration data is acknowledged - not something raised later as a surprise.
• A growing willingness to use Model C. Tightly-defined Requests are being used to keep disclosure proportionate, with the parties agreeing custodians, date ranges and search terms up front.

Practical consequences for eDiscovery

For the provider side, this means the work in the first few weeks of a matter has shifted further upstream. Data mapping, custodian interviews and platform discovery now happen in time to feed the DRD, not after Extended Disclosure has been ordered. Search-term testing - running candidate terms against a sample of data and reporting hit-rates and false-positive risk - has become a routine part of agreeing Model C Requests.

It also means more attention is being paid to messaging and collaboration platforms. Disclosure orders increasingly assume that Teams, Slack and mobile chat data will be in scope where custodians used them for work, and the courts expect parties to have considered conversational review formats like RSMF rather than producing decontextualised PDFs.

What we recommend

Treat PD 57AD as a discipline, not a hurdle. The work the rule forces parties to do - defining issues, mapping data sources, scoping searches - is the same work that produces a defensible, proportionate disclosure exercise. Engaging an eDiscovery provider before the DRD is finalised, rather than after, is usually the difference between a clean process and one that has to be re-explained at the CMC.

For the underlying text of the rules, see the Civil Procedure Rules - PD 57AD. The Civil Justice Council's final report on the original Disclosure Pilot remains useful background on why the regime took the shape it did.