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 is an estimate, after all. Therefore, one can create a fair estimate based upon the pages per email ratio.

Before electronic discovery, or “ediscovery”, the number of treatment options, such as bibliographic coding, was limited. One could scan, OCR, code and annotate images, but not much else. The number of treatment options increased dramatically with introduction of ediscovery. Not only may ediscovery require treatments and services, unknown to paper, but ediscovery may afford the legal team new options unavailable to paper discovery. New options, such as hosting and native file review, present new potential costs and logistical hurdles to the attorney and Litigation Support. Some one these costs occur only once, such as converting an email “PST” file into a database. Some costs are recurring, such as hosting fees.

To estimate hosting, one should know the total storage size in GBs, number of months required and number of people who will access the system. The attorney needs a budget spreadsheet that details both potential technology costs and illustrates the relationship between price and quantity. The attorney can then use the spreadsheet to explain costs to the client.

The legal team and litigation support will use certain software titles during specific parts of the case lifecycle, such as exhibit software used during deps and trial. People will use other titles throughout the entire case lifecycle, such as the discovery database. In fact, one would be well advised to make sure work product in one title easily transfers to another. This consideration seems obvious but many teams have worked down the dead end roads. A good metric for the budget is the total cost in time and money was due to technical glitches which could have been avoided.

A technology plan directly impacts the final budget for litigation. One could certainly use the aggregated data from every spreadsheet to get an idea of appropriate pricing and identify the better vendors. This means using the same budget spreadsheet in every matter so that a given line item appears in the same position in each file. This makes aggregating your data possible. The book, Litigation Support Department, contains a budget spreadsheet on the accompanying CD. The budget spreadsheet also includes worksheets for tracking projects, listing key contacts and key words.