Finding the Right Five Questions for EDD Vendors (Law Technology News, 6 Oct 2008) asks e-discovery experts to answer the question “What are the five most important questions that any organization should ask of vendors before signing the contract?” Most of the experts’ questions focus on EDD hosting and processing capabilities rather than the end-to-end discovery process, including document review. In our experience, companies spend far more on the lawyers who review documents than on the (albeit often daunting) mechanics of e-discovery.
That said, we were surprised by a recent survey finding. Law firm Fulbright & Jaworksi L.L.P. conducts an annual survey of litigation trends. In its 2008 Fulbright’s Litigation Trends Survey, of the 253 U.S. respondents who answered a privilege review cost question:
“30% estimated that privilege reviews comprised 6% to 10% of their litigation costs, while 16% estimated the figure as high as 30% to 50%. Most of the latter figure consisted of the mid-sized and the largest companies participating… When asked for the largest amount spent on preproduction privilege review in a single matter or collection of related matters… Two percent of all the respondents spent between $1 million and $2 million, and 2% were in the $3 million to $5 million range. Five percent of the largest companies spent $3 million to $5 million for privilege review on a single matter or group of related matters.”
We’ve often heard it said that 60% of the cost of litigation is discovery and 60% of that is document review. If true, about 35% of the total litigation cost is doc review. So reading that one-third of responding companies spend less than 10% on priv review surprised us. We wonder if both the perception of and the actual total cost of privilege review is skewed upward by the 4% that spend over $1 million on at least one big case.
Irrespective of how much privilege review costs, we increasingly see inhouse counsel seek a single point of contact and fixed price per document for all of e-discovery. They want to minimize the headache, reduce cost, and offer predictability.
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