eDiscovery Daily Blog

Is Pricing Transparency Finally Happening in eDiscovery?: eDiscovery Trends

An age old issue in eDiscovery has been understanding and comparing pricing between various vendors and service providers.  It’s the old “apples vs. oranges” comparison when considering pricing.  A new article, which references a terrific benchmark test, may show that pricing transparency by at least two eDiscovery providers may be finally helping put eDiscovery pricing on common ground.

Rob Robinson’s article on his Complex Discovery blog (An eDiscovery Challenge: Pricing Consistency and Transparency) discusses how eDiscovery continues to challenge law firms and legal departments with a lack of consistency and transparency in pricing. Rob notes that this “lack of consistency and transparency appears to have many reasons with most originating from that fact that eDiscovery solutions (software and/or services) tend to be complex and require and understanding of need, volume, and duration before the configuration of a specific quote to assign a price to the value to be provided. However, with the advent of fourth generation eDiscovery solutions, it appears that some vendors are now comfortable enough with their understanding of the economics and capabilities of their solutions to publicly present pricing to current and potential customers.”

Rob shows how two eDiscovery providers (one of them happens to be CloudNine) have begun “publicly sharing the pricing of their technology solutions, providing an example of how consistent and transparent pricing can be highlighted leading eDiscovery vendors.”  He also references Craig Ball’s updated EDna Challenge from last year (which we covered here) that provides a hypothetical scenario where an eDiscovery solution needs to be provided for less than $5,000 under the following parameters:

  • Three Person Legal Team
  • Process, Search, Review, and Produce
  • 10 Custodians
  • 10-12 GB Total of Data
  • Up to 90 Day Review
  • Up to 21 Months Archiving

Under that framework, both solutions provide a cost estimate to address the hypothetical scenario.  Rob notes that “both offerings meet the technology and business challenges posed by the EDna Challenge”, but “the real value of this comparison is to present how the consistency and transparency of publicly published pricing allows for these types of comparisons without the need for specific challenges and with legal professionals being able to make initial comparisons without special or one-off quotes.”

Last year, for a presentation that I did for the State Bar of Texas, I wrote a white paper titled How SaaS Automation Has Revolutionized eDiscovery for Solo and Small Firms and the comparison of Craig’s 2009 EDna challenge (and the lack of full-featured solutions that could meet that challenge within the ascribed budget) to his 2016 EDna challenge (where several SaaS automation solutions could do so, albeit on a larger budget) was discussed in that white paper.  If anyone would like a copy, feel free to email me at daustin@cloudnine.com.  Hopefully, the trend toward pricing transparency continues and, thanks to Craig, we have a framework for truly comparing apples to apples.

So, what do you think?  Is comparing pricing from multiple eDiscovery vendors a challenge in your organization? 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 CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine 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 Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

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