Top Ten Tips for Electronic Discovery Cost Containment

1. Manage your vendor. Get very specific up-front pricing information
   in the form of a letter of agreement from your electronic discovery or computer
   forensics vendor and hold them to it.
2. Do your homework. If your opponent has a huge quote from his expert
   for eDiscovery services, (and he wants you to share the costs) ask the court
   for permission to obtain a quote from another vendor for identical work. You
   may be surprised at the cost differences. This is particularly true in cases
   in which your opponent (attempting to avoid eDiscovery) claims the data you
   are requesting is “inaccessible” under the definition of the New
   Federal Rules. Well, maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. Technology is advancing
   rapidly and costs for production are falling.
3. Detailed Billing. Ask your vender for interim billing on large projects
   and get detailed information about what components of the engagement have
   been completed and what remains. (and the associated costs) This can avoid
   surprises.
4. Planning ahead will allow you to do your eDiscovery in phases. Eg.,
   image and analyze a few computers from a few key players and then pause. Perform
   a review of the Electronically Stored Information (ESI) that you have discovered,
   then make determinations about how far you have to go. Better yet, encourage
   your clients to begin moving to enterprise solutions to managing ESI that
   is likely to be relevant or responsive in litigation. Example, specific litigation
   servers for storing ESI for particular business units, thoughtful E-Mail management,
   etc. Also, educate your clients, particularly the larger ones that are always
   in litigation, with regard to the general costs of eDiscovery so they will
   not have sticker shock when the bills come it. In this age of eDiscovery,
   They should be budgeting for eDiscovery.
5. Drives Price. Determine the size of your data set before getting
   a quote for high-end eDiscovery processing, since some of that pricing may
   be per GB
6. The Underdog Card. When possible, try to present your client as
   the financial underdog
7. Know Cost Shifting Trends and Strategies. Be aggressive with cost-shifting
   arguments especially if your opponent is offering ideas that are expensive
   and outside the norm with respect to guidelines established in the New Federal
   Rules and Sedona Principles. Get educated and do your research with respect
   to similar cases with positive outcomes….offer industry best practices
   that demonstrate your opponent’s requests are burdensome if there is
   a legitimate argument for that point of view.
8. Shop! Get another quote if you believe your vendor is too pricey
9. Stop! Don’t produce everything! Think you need to tiff all
   your data? Get our your wallet. However, sometimes you can do an electronic
   review with filtering before tiffing to cull-out duplicates and non-responsive
   docs before production. This can save a fortune.
10. Sampling Saves Money. Consider data sampling, particularly when
    you have a massive amount of data and the case does not seem to warrant a
    significant eDiscovery budget. Select some important date ranges on data under
    the care of key players and run sample searches with agreed key words. If
    this yields valuable results, do a cost benefit analysis on increasing the
    scope.