Yesterday

In eDiscovery’s short history, most technical feats have been too complex or too dependent on ever-changing variables for a turnkey solution to be possible.  How to extract all the metadata?  How to handle NSF files?  How to deal with family groups, attachments and embedded documents in those attachments?  Every problem required custom programming, new workflows and all the extra effort needed to trail-blaze in a new industry.

Today

Here we are in 2010, and we treat processing vendors like they are nearly interchangeable.  Whether they use LAW PreDiscovery, eCapture, Nuix or some other solution, we are pretty much getting the same output.  That’s a good thing.  If we are getting different results from different tools, then we might have to go back to the drawing board as an industry.  But the fact is, the middle of the EDRM is pretty well defined and we have a number of solutions that meets its needs.

And how many people go straight to processing these days, anyway?  Many of us use other automated solutions like Clearwell or Trident Wave to help us filter, cull and analyze data before we even need it fully processed.  Take it a step further, with tools like Caseview from @Legal or ONE from Driven, and suddenly we have solutions that handle analysis, processing, review and production in one fell swoop.  I guess we found our turnkey solutions.

Commodity?

So the question is, if the technology in the middle of the EDRM allows you to take an input and produce the same output regardless of the what tool you use, then why are we not yet looking at commodity pricing?  Vendors are still advertising pricing all across the board: $950/GB for processing, $1050/GB and even $1500/GB.  $0.03/page for OCR, $0.04/page or $0.02/page.  $95/GB for filtering, $250/GB, etc.

If these processes are commodities, then why are we being quoted so many different rates and why are these services not all bundled?

Tomorrow

What law firms and corporations will demand is the middle of the EDRM to become a bundled commodity.  Analysis, processing, review and production technologies need to have a bundled, flat rate.  The price needs to be reasonable and predictable.  Technology is no longer a barrier, so we are only limited by industry standards and custom - and both need to change.