Remember when I discussed about a month ago how the eDiscovery review market may never be the same?  The eDiscovery collection market may never be the same either.  And, you’re probably not surprised by that.

A couple of days ago, Rob Robinson’s terrific Complex Discovery site discussed the eDiscovery Collection market to follow up his discussion a month ago regarding the eDiscovery review market.  And, in his article Home or Away? New eDiscovery Collection Market Sizing and Pricing Considerations (in addition to making us long for baseball games with his post image), he discussed how business, legal, and IT professionals in the eDiscovery ecosystem are currently having to consider how they plan for and execute the eDiscovery task of collection in today’s pandemeconomically-impacted new world.

As in the earlier article regarding review, Rob reiterates that the pandemic “does not appear at this early juncture in the evaluation of its on-going impact to have significantly altered the task percentage estimates in 2020 for collection, processing, and review”.  But he does adjust modeling estimates for market size estimations for the collection task of eDiscovery downward and he also adjusts the percentage distribution between on-site and remote collections dramatically as well – even more dramatically than the change in percentage distribution for reviews.  Of course, we’re over a month later and there’s no end in sight for the remote work – in our industry, at least.

In addition to that, Rob also reviewed summer results of his semi-annual eDiscovery Pricing Survey to provide insight to help you better understand currently reported general pricing ranges regarding selected collection-centric eDiscovery tasks.

To find out how much the estimates change and see current reported pricing for collection tasks, check out Rob’s post here.

As I’ve discussed in several posts here, the move to remote eDiscovery services began well before the pandemic began – it just shifted into hyper drive when everybody was forced to work remotely.  Will organizations revert back to services the way they were before when the pandemic ends?  I doubt that most will.  Nor should they.

So, what do you think?  Do you expect that remote eDiscovery services will be the “new norm”, even after the pandemic ends?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, may partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.