My posting here has been light because we’re head-down writing a major report on eDiscovery which will arrive in November, followed by a webinar. Here’s a few of the things we’ve learned along the way, some of which we suspected in advance, some of which were totally new to us:
- This is a highly fragmented market – there is no clear leader.
- The market has been shaped as much by US civil procedure rules and US privacy laws – or lack thereof – than any technology innovation.
- However, technology innovation still has a big part to play in this market’s future direction.
- End users are growing tired of paying by the gigabyte – new models will emerge.
- Purchasing influence is shifting rapidly from law firms to the corporate legal departments (those large bills have focused their mind in a hurry).
- End users are very reluctant to talk publicly about what they’re doing (but boy, are we trying to persuade them to!)
- Some (but not all) of the large information management vendors that should have a strategy in this area don’t have anything of the sort (see first point).
Anyway there will be more where that came from when the report is out, and we’ll make sure the webinar details are posted here ahead of time. Plus we’ll be talking about this at our annual client event, which is November 10-11 in Boston, MA. See you there!
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3 comments ↓
Excellent synopsis. On the “pricing per GB” note, do you find that the “tiredness of paying by the GB” is based on the challenge of predicting a projects pricing more than an actual concern of what is being used for the metric when determining costs?
To help understand this challenge – we have developed a tool to help users see the big picture – the picture beyond the initial GB cost. Some of your clients may be interested in the tool – which available for free at:
http://orangelt.us/technology/pricing_estimator/.
Its an objective tool for comparing traditional and analytics upfront eDiscovery models – and uses industry standard information to help present the total cost of discovery – to include review time/costs for reviewers.
Again – thanks for the synopsis – and we look forward to your complete report.
Hi Rob,
Re per GB pricing, it is indeed more the former than the latter, but simply because not only are project sizes hard to predict but also because of sticker shock.
Obviously if the price were deemed reasonable afterward even if it was unpredictable beforehand, it wouldn’t be such a big issue.
Nick
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