Costs is a tricky issue. There is no question that there were tectonic shifts in pricing and costs for eDiscovery over the last 12-18 moths. This has been particularly manifest in eDiscovery processing and hosting. High-priced “state-of-the-art” hosting offerings became a commodity, powerhouse service bureaus disappeared, those that survived are ready to take on projects for much less, and new pricing models emerged from “all inclusive fixed cost” to “buy the hosting and get the processing free”, and everything in between. Do law firms and corporate legal departments today pay less for eDiscovery services? Definitely, there’s no question about it. Did this change make the life of the review manager any easier? Not at all. In his book The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less (no relation to the famous Equivio tag line), Barry Schwartz describes the following test. Jams were presented on two tables in a supermarket. The first table presented 24 types of jam, and the other table, featured 6 types. The results were very interesting -- only 3% of the customers that approached the first table bought jam, compared to 30% of the customers that approached the table with the narrower choice. In other words, too many alternatives, even “good” alternatives, cause us confusion, regret and fear. And there’s an even deeper concern here – did the massive reduction in eDiscovery processing and hosting costs solve the litigation cost problem? Absolutely not. The reason for this is that the overwhelmingly dominant cost component in eDiscovery is litigation review. The processing price war may have put a dent in overall costs, but the fundamental cost problem remains, and continues to balloon in step with electronic document volumes (indeed there are some who say that the review problem got even worse over the last year because vendors started going to market with a thinner offering, with less analytics, in order to compete on price – but, to be honest, we have not seen any evidence of this – on the contrary). So, if you ask what eDiscovery managers want for Xmas, the first thing they want is a way to get litigation review costs down.
Well, Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa are over for another year. My list of resolutions for next year is long and promising. Item #2 on the list is to make the life of review managers a bit less difficult in 2010. That will be subject of the final post in this series. Meanwhile, the attentive reader may ask what is #1 on my list, but my wife’s attorney insisted that it be kept confidential.
Happy new year!
| 
