Come on down!  It’s time for another great survey from Rob Robinson and his terrific Complex Discovery blog!  This time it’s his semi-annual eDiscovery Pricing Survey, which is designed to provide insight into eDiscovery pricing through the lens of 12 specific questions answered by legal, business, and information technology professionals operating in the eDiscovery ecosystem.  Here is what’s covered in the Summer 2021 eDiscovery Pricing Survey Results.

The Summer 2021 eDiscovery Pricing Survey response period was initiated on May 24, 2021 and closed on June 4, 2021. This was the sixth eDiscovery pricing survey conducted by Complex Discovery, the initial survey being conducted in December of 2018 (and the third one I’ve already covered on this blog!).  I covered the others too… 😉 

This survey had 105(!) respondents, 83.8% of which were providers (Law Firm – 43.8%, Software and/or Services Provider – 26.7%, and Consultancy – 13.3%).  That’s 88(!) providers talking about eDiscovery pricing!

As I said before, talking about eDiscovery pricing in this industry is like talking about Fight Club, the first rule and second rule seems to be that you don’t talk about it.  Only Rob Robinson could get 105 people (88 of them providers) to talk about what isn’t talked about in this industry.

One of the great things about this survey is it provides a reflection of what people in the marketplace are generally expecting to spend for various services including forensic collection (per hour and per device), forensic analysis and expert witness support (per hour), processing costs (per GB), hosting costs without and with analytics (per GB per month ), user license fees (per user per month), project management support (per hour), predictive coding (per GB) and document review services (per hour and per document).  Now you know what to expect to pay for these services when you go to negotiate with your providers!

One notable change between this survey and the previous ones is that Rob provided an alternative pricing model option for each of the pricing categories.  Selection of the alternative pricing model option ranged from a low of 2.9% for analysis and expert witness support by a forensic examiner up to 40% for predictive coding as part of a technology-assisted review during the document review phase of eDiscovery.  40 percent!

So, what are the current expectations regarding pricing for various eDiscovery services in the Summer 2021 eDiscovery Pricing Survey?  I won’t steal Rob’s thunder in this blog, check out the survey results here.

So, what do you think?  Are you surprised by any of the pricing survey results in the Summer 2021 eDiscovery Pricing Survey?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image Copyright © Fremantle

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, 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.