With school out for most kids, it’s unofficially summer! So, it’s time for the Summer 2023 eDiscovery Pricing Survey Results published by Rob Robinson and his terrific ComplexDiscovery blog!

Rob’s semi-annual eDiscovery Pricing Survey is designed to provide insight into eDiscovery pricing through the lens of 24 specific questions answered by legal, business, and information technology professionals operating in the eDiscovery ecosystem. The Summer 2023 eDiscovery Pricing Survey response period (results available here) was initiated on May 6, 2023, and continued until May 26, 2023. This was the tenth eDiscovery pricing survey conducted by ComplexDiscovery, the initial survey being conducted in December of 2018 (and the seventh one I’ve already covered on this blog!).

This survey had 60 respondents, 85% of which were providers (Law Firm – 46.7%, Software and/or Services Provider – 28.3%,and Consultancy – 10.0%). That’s 51(!) providers talking about eDiscovery pricing!

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).

This is also the fifth survey that provides an option for an alternative pricing model option for each of the pricing categories and a few of the categories had a significant percentage of respondents select the alternative pricing model once again.

Only Rob Robinson could get 60 people (51 of them providers) to talk about what isn’t talked about in this industry. A “must-have” resource for anyone who may have a need for any of these services in the near (or even not so near) future.

So, are prices “heating up” for various eDiscovery services in the Summer 2023 eDiscovery Pricing Survey? To “whet your appetite” for the results, I’ll share one of them here:

What is the per GB cost to conduct predictive coding as part of a technology-assisted review for 250 GB or less?

• Less than $75 per GB. 25.0%
• Between $75 and $150 per GB. 8.3%
• Greater than $150 per GB. 3.3%
• Do not know. 25.0%
• Alternative pricing model for per GB costs. 38.3%

By my count, this makes four out of five surveys where the alternative pricing model was most selected for predictive coding pricing. Interesting!

As for the other results, 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 2023 eDiscovery Pricing Survey? 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, 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.