Three Factors Responsible for Driving Up eDiscovery Costs

A look into the exponential growth of data, the complexity of people processes and technology, and the razor-thin deadlines


Every professional involved in eDiscovery would agree that budgets drive everything, including technological solutions. Therefore, they must be cost-effective to truly solve problems. However, these professionals frequently struggle with the existing eDiscovery solutions. One of the most significant reasons is that eDiscovery budgets are often fraught with price shock accounting for 20% to 50% of all litigation expenses. This has prompted many industry leaders to debate why the costs of running an eDiscovery function continue to rise at a rate that outpaces practically every other department or function year after year. Though there are a variety of reasons responsible for driving the eDiscovery operations' cost, the following three are the most common:

  • Data is growing at an exponential rate

  • Complexity of technology

  • Razor-thin deadlines


Data is growing at an exponential rate

While everyone understands that data is growing exponentially, many people are unclear of its actual pace. According to the 2020 IDC report, the amount of data produced in the next three years will be more significant than that produced in the previous 30 years. According to the estimate, the world will create three times the amount of data in the next five years as it did in the last 5, reaching a 180-zettabyte (a trillion gigabytes) range by 2025.


Apart from that, employees' increased usage of devices, software, and networking tools and solutions due to the rapid shift to work from home has made data gathering considerably more difficult.


Needless to say, a majority of all this data will be subject to eDiscovery assessment putting further strain on the existing eDiscovery solutions.


The complexity of people, processes, and technology

In terms of technological intricacy, it's vital to remember that in eDiscovery, there's no such thing as a Google search, where you can receive your results just by typing the keywords into the search engine. Instead, many eDiscovery and compliance solutions are extremely data-intensive, including hundreds of rows of data and thick text threads that must be digested and made searchable almost instantaneously. For example, eDiscovery teams are sometimes given a few gigabytes of data on Thursday with the expectation that it will be available for reviewers by Monday. To cater to such issues, people, processes, and technology must all operate in unison to achieve this, with no outages and under extremely tight schedules and industry operating standards. This necessitates high-capacity, high-cost eDiscovery systems with the same components as conventional IT: servers, PCs, business applications, security, networks, storage, backups, and interconnectivity.


Razor-thin deadlines

Since litigation does not wait for anybody, deadlines are real in eDiscovery, and missing them may be extremely expensive. But many businesses fail to precisely predict:

  • When an issue will arrive

  • Any deadlines that are related to that case

  • The amount of data to be analyzed for that case

  • The data's destination (aggregated versus disaggregated)


Since we cannot foresee what will happen in a pending lawsuit, most executives think that the ideal way is to develop an eDiscovery system that can be ready to handle an early case assessment at any time. As a result, the great majority of eDiscovery systems are over-engineered to handle severe one-off cases rather than routine matters.


These three elements are the most common causes of rising eDiscovery expenses. Still, once you know what's causing your costs to grow, you can start focusing on the things you can control, like system designs and better information management, while preparing for the things you can't, like data expansion and uncertain deadlines.

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