Ad Litem Consulting, Inc.

Department and Firm Level Initiatives

Needs Assessment

Creating a budget for litigation technology goods and services is not an easy chore. Before electronic discovery, one could multiply the number of boxes by 2,500 and estimate the page count. An industry average of 3 pages per document was generally sufficient for estimating the costs for any special treatments, such as bibliographic coding. Electronic discovery changed this.

While a "pages per box" ratio is simple, it is more difficult to estimate the total number of pages by the total GBs. This is because the format and content of electronic discovery can be as varied as the number of software titles which run on anyone's computer. A GB of one type of file may yield thousands of pages, while another file type would only yield hundreds or dozens of pages. This makes any generalized pages per GB ratio almost useless. Fortunately, the bulk of ediscovery is of a single file type, email, and this can be estimated, after all. Therefore, one can create a fair estimate based upon the pages per email ratio. Use the included budget spreadsheet to perform this task.

Note: For large ediscovery projects where the vendor delivers the discovery database incrementally, the Litigation Support Department can update the spreadsheet to reflect real versus estimated costs.

Before ediscovery, the number of treatment options, such as bibliographic coding, was limited. One could scan, OCR, code and annotate images. This all changed with introduction of ediscovery. Not only may ediscovery require treatments and services, unknown to paper, but it may afford the legal team new options. Almost every option, such as hosting and native file review, present new potential costs. Some one these costs occur only once. Some costs are recurring. To estimate hosting, one should know the total storage size in GBs, number of months required and number of people who will need to access the system. Fortunately, the budget spreadsheet accommodates this option, amongst others.

Litigation Support should use the budget spreadsheet to explain potential technology costs to the attorney. The spreadsheet is a very straightforward way for anyone to understand the relationship between price and quantity. The attorney can then use the spreadsheet to explain costs to the client.

The budget spreadsheet includes multiple worksheets. The first worksheet is for the budget. Subsequent sheets are for tracking projects, keywords and names, and finally a place to store everyone's contact information. This information is especially useful for cases that were dormant for a long time, or if one person must track multiple matters.

Note: This spreadsheet used in conjunction with the case lifecycle project plan can prove invaluable to resuming work or learning the case's ediscovery history.

Department and Firm Level Initiatives

Needs Assessment