Canadian Lawyer

18 J U L Y 2 0 1 5 w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m When people think e-discovery pric- ing, they typically think of costs for host- ing data, user licences, and processing data into a review platform and produc- ing data out of a review plat- form. Currently, the dominant unit for pricing is the gigabyte, except for user licences, which refers to access rights to data in a review platform and is price per user. This is the workflow a typical pricing arrangement assumes: a party receives a DVD with 4 GB of e-mail PSTs on it (e-mail personal stores, it's a way of "zipping up" e-mail in a single package, in this case anywhere from 15,000-40,000 e-mails and attachments, depending on a range of factors (I have dealt with the challenge of converting con- tainer size to individual items in a different column on pricing)). These e-mails need to be pre- pared for loading into a review platform, by processing, which can be analogized to "very fancy photocopying": this is where e-mails are converted to a format the review platform application can use, and also involves extracting metadata and text for searching, relating attach- ments to e-mails, and a variety of other technical processes, including dedupli- cation. The cost for processing is usually priced in GB expanded (meaning on the total volume, a requirement because data is often compressed during delivery). Sometimes, people will do other things during processing: cull the data using fil- ters such as date range, file type, or some- times keywords and this will be included in the price or processing. Culling aims to reduce the total amount of data at the processing stage, because generally processing costs are lower than review platform costs. After processing (priced per GB), whatever volume of data is left will be loaded into a review platform. There will frequently be a charge for loading the data, priced per GB (often a higher price per GB than the first per-GB culling price). If this seems to you like being charged twice against the same data, you are correct, even though this is usually explained by noting these are two different processes. In addition, there will be monthly hosting charges (per GB) as well as a price per month per user for access rights to the review platform. To get the data out of the review platform, there will generally be a per- GB (or per-page) charge associated with production. (Again, if you think this is a third charge applied against the same data, though a smaller subset of it, you are correct, even though this again is usually explained by noting this is a third process, different than the first two.) I have just described pric- ing for e-discovery in terms of a common workflow. However, many workflows exist to get e-discovery done. For exam- ple, a former workflow used to involve imaging all documents in processing and loading tiffs into a review platform (this is what was required in early days, due to technology limi- tations in platforms); however, making tiffs during processing is not required if the review plat- form can handle it on the fly for redactions. Making tiffs is among the more expensive processes in e-discovery, per unit, so reducing this step to only those documents required for production saves costs. (Not tiffing into a review platform also saves on hosting costs because tiffs are generally larger, per file, than its native.) One of the workflow innovations I practise is "breaking up" processed T E C H S U P P O RT dnevin@proskauer.com O P I N I O N Changes coming to e-discovery pricing By Dera J. Nevin uch of my job involves creating and buying e-discovery servic- es for the organizations I work for and for third parties, includ- ing clients. I'm seeing some systematic changes to e-discovery pricing, which I'll highlight at the end of this column. Some of those shifts reflect contradictory practices in e-discovery pricing and service delivery. There are two significant components to the price of e-dis- covery services: unit price and workflow. Because unit price is what shows up on estimates, unit price has been experiencing pricing pressure including commoditization. However, negotia- tion on workflow can often yield more significant overall pricing concessions or advantages. M

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