eDiscovery Daily Blog

• October 7, 2010

Tuesday, we talked about putting together a “big picture plan” for your project. And, yesterday, we provided step-by-step instructions for preparing a schedule for a specific task and identifying the resources you’ll need. Now let’s talk about preparing a budget.

Preparing a Budget

Depending on the task, there may be a lot of cost components in your budget. For many projects – for example, a document review project – the biggest cost component will be people. Let’s continue to use the document review task example.

When you prepared your schedule, you determined the number of man-hours required for the core part of the task. Take that number and multiply it by the billing rate of the team doing the work. This will most likely be your biggest cost component. Now let’s add on other costs:

• In addition to the team doing the work, you’ll need quality control reviewers. If you want to do thorough quality control work, It’s safe to estimate that you’ll need 1 quality control person for every 4 reviewers. Calculate the number of man-hours for quality control and multiply that by the billing rate for the quality control staff.
• Build in project management and supervisory staff hours. Maybe your quality control team will double as supervisors and all you’ll need to add in are the costs for a full-time project manager.
• Determine how long training will take, and add in the costs for everybody on the team to attend training.
• If you’re using a service provider to host your documents and provide an online review tool, add in the costs for that (some service providers charge monthly for storage; others charge monthly for storage and monthly per user).
• Add in the costs for up-front work like preparing procedures and coordinating efforts with the service provider.
• Add in costs for processing data and loading into the online review tool.

That may be it. But think through incidental costs you might incur and include them in your budget.

We’ve covered all of the basic components of planning a project, but we’re not done with planning yet. One of the tasks on a large electronic discovery project is yet another planning task: Preparing a plan for gathering data. Next time, I’ll walk you through putting together a data-gathering plan.

So, what do you think? Do you have any questions about the budgeting process? Please share any comments you might have or tell us if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.