The Lure and Lore of EDD Commodity Pricing

In theory, e-discovery services ought to be easy to sell. After all, the legal profession has been working to define and standardize the process of obtaining, producing, and searching electronic records in litigation for many years. Vendors now offer more standardized pricing, but many lawyers say that e-discovery continues to defy easy pricing models. "Consumers push hard for commodity pricing, assuming vendors will do the same tasks the same way for the same price," says George Socha, an attorney and e-discovery consultant in St. Paul, Minn. "But we're not talking a commodity like a bushel of grain. Almost all pieces of the e-discovery process defy commoditization."

Over the past few years, there has been a vigorous debate over whether e-discovery services may become a commodity -- a service with set pricing models for industry standard practices. In fact, much of what e-discovery vendors do has now become a repeatable, commodity process. Pieces of the discovery process like loading data, eliminating duplicate copies, and document production, are now relatively routine. However, it turns out that pricing e-discovery services is just not easy to standardize.

Until recently, commodity pricing was considered something of a panacea, offering a simplified business model that would take the uncertainty and complexity out of the process. But simplified pricing does not appeal to everyone in the field. "Two years ago I would have said (commodity pricing) was the end game," says Bill Speros, a Cleveland-based e-discovery consultant. "But even if there is a pricing model commoditizing e-discovery services and processing, I realize that I don't want to work with a commodity provider."

That's because even through the basic function of discovery is the same in most cases, once lawyers start dealing with actual electronic data sets, complications are inevitable and even the best budgets can get out of their control. Not only are implementations of software systems different in different organizations, but advances in computing, like recent developments in cloud computing and mobile applications bring unpredictability to the process. That demands specialized attention and customer support from litigation support vendors. "If information technology stops and does not change or advance; if we could tell Microsoft and Apple not to release any new versions of their software or operating systems or make no new iPads, then we might be able to have more predictable processing," says Socha. "But that's the only way I can see that happening."

To Continue Reading: Click Here
-------------------------------------------------
Source: law.com
By: Jason Krause