Electronic Discovery & Computer Forensics : RenewData : Austin, Texas

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By Bob Little
Chief Marketing Officer
RenewData

Like it or not, eDiscovery providers have a reputation for under promising on estimated costs and over delivering on actual bills. This is something that we just wouldn't accept in our everyday lives. Imagine trying to buy a sweater using a per stitch pricing model. You'd really have no idea what the final price would be and could end up with the world's most expensive sweater or perhaps a sweater with only one sleeve because you can't afford the entire garment. Budgeting for eDiscovery is certainly more complicated than a sweater purchase. But this just magnifies the risk that budget uncertainty brings to the process.

To a certain extent, this was acceptable and even made sense back in the infancy of our market. Litigants and their advisors didn’t really know what they were seeking or what efforts would be required. And vendors didn’t know what would be presented to them and exactly how to fulfill the requests. Each project was somewhat unique and there was much on the fly development of techniques, tools, and processes. Pricing was therefore generally a custom arrangement and total costs inherently unpredictable. Eventually a correlation was seen between the costs to deliver the services and the volume of the information that was processed and so pricing generally evolved to a fee per gigabyte model. This allowed customers to begin comparing potential costs between vendors but still gave little if any budget certainty to the customer since few projects’ size could be predicted in advance.

However, our industry is no longer immature. Service providers, especially top tier providers, have seen many projects with a full range of variables. As vendors, we know what the typical types of media are and what the resultant volumes likely will be. We have enough aggregate information to develop a price model that will give our customers the budget certainty they need by basing our pricing upon factors that can be readily counted and controlled at the onset of a project. For example, while customers often have no realistic estimate of the final volume of information that will be processed for eDiscovery, they do generally know how many custodians are of interest. A per custodian processing fee gives customers a better sense of what their discovery costs will be at the beginning of the project.

Our customers have become more sophisticated. Our understanding of the nature of eDiscovery projects and the cost parameters are likewise more sophisticated. It is time for some of the risk to shift to the vendor community. At RenewData, we’ve made a commitment to transparency and predictability in our pricing. Click here for more information. We believe this is the future model for eDiscovery pricing.