Transparency Matters in Ediscovery
In our first post in this series, we explored the key principle of speed and how it manifests in the Everlaw platform. This second post in the series addresses the key principle of transparency. After examining what transparency should look like in an ediscovery vendor’s organization, this post will explore how transparency functions on the Everlaw platform.
Why Transparency Matters in Ediscovery
With ediscovery accounting for up to 70% of litigation fees, transparency in pricing is of paramount importance in any ediscovery solution. Unfortunately, thanks to a few bad actors, the pricing murkiness in the ediscovery industry makes it difficult to compare the costs of any given set of ediscovery solutions across different providers, platforms, and services.
Hidden lines in contracts, masking additional fees, can lead to dramatic unexpected costs. One ediscovery solution provider may charge extra for time-saving analytics features, like predictive coding or email threading. Another vendor may charge for additional user licenses. Another may provide hard-to-use software, then charge additional fees in the guise of project management services. It is also quite common to see a vendor charge for processing fees, including OCRing per page, imaging per page, or endorsing production images per page.
A transparent ediscovery vendor should commit to an avoidance of mysterious calculations at invoice time. Redoing client and vendor bills as you scale a case up or down is a poor experience. Not only is it difficult to guess how many reviewers or how much training you might need, it also makes it difficult to budget for projects. Vendor pricing should be easy both to understand and predict. It should be free of setup fees, processing fees, user fees, training fees, technical support fees, exporting fees, predictive coding fees, production fees, foreign language translation fees, printing fees, etc.
Transparency on the Everlaw Platform
The Everlaw commitment to transparency manifests most obviously in the product itself. Training and support is free, with customized materials depending on a user’s role in the review process. This enables Everlaw users to fully leverage the platform without relying on certified experts or incurring costly project management fees.
Matter management offers the ability to self-manage the size of a project’s data on the platform. Deleting documents that are no longer necessary for a project is a simple, self-serve way to control project costs.
Beyond product, the Everlaw goal in pricing is that it be easy to understand and predictable. It’s based on the amount of data hosted, with unlimited user licenses, and unlimited processing and productions. At any time, project administrators can visualize the billing size of the data in their case, and segment that visualization by specific content and metadata in order to understand what segments of data may be contributing to their costs.
To learn more about the key questions to ask your ediscovery vendor, watch our on-demand webinar “Taking Aim at Ediscovery Vendors” or read the whitepaper “A Critical Evaluation of Ediscovery Vendors.”
