Guides
Reference guides on how eDiscovery is priced, what productions require, how ESI protocols work and how to budget a matter. Written for practitioners.
These guides answer the questions practitioners actually type, and they answer them with sources. Every figure traces to a named one: the Federal Rules, a reported opinion, EDRM, The Sedona Conference, the RAND Institute for Civil Justice, the ComplexDiscovery pricing survey, or our own published rate. Where a number is a rule of thumb rather than a measurement, it says so.
Two clusters run through them. The first is cost: what a gigabyte contains, what it costs to process once and host every month afterwards, and why a single quoted rate rarely predicts a bill. The second is mechanics: what an ESI protocol fixes before anything is produced, and what to check on a production before it leaves. The glossary defines every term the guides use, and the tools run the same arithmetic on your own figures.
What does eDiscovery cost, and why?
The eDiscovery Fee Field Guide
Every common eDiscovery fee decoded: what it means, what it costs to deliver, and the questions to ask before you sign. 19 fees across five categories.
Open →How much does eDiscovery cost? Every fee, with 2026 market ranges
Most eDiscovery bills are built from five or six separate meters. This guide lists each one, gives the 2026 market range, and explains why the total is so hard to forecast, then shows the flat-rate alternative for comparison.
Open →eDiscovery cost per GB: processing, hosting, the real total
The per-GB price on a quote is one line of a bill with five or six. Processing is charged once per GB; hosting recurs every month for the life of the matter; user licenses, productions and project management sit on top. Over an 18-month matter the effective cost per GB is many times the headline.
Open →eDiscovery for small law firms: what you need and what it costs
A small firm needs four things: defensible collection, processing into a searchable set, a review platform its own people can drive, and productions that meet the other side's specification. Most of what enterprise platforms charge extra for sits outside that list.
Open →How many pages are in a gigabyte? 15,000 to 680,000
A gigabyte holds between roughly 15,000 and 680,000 pages depending on what the files are: scanned images near 15,500 pages per GB, email near 100,000, plain text near 678,000. Document counts run from about 1,200 to 10,000 per GB. That spread is why per-GB pricing is a poor proxy for review effort.
Open →How is a production actually run?
eDiscovery for paralegals: the practical manual
Hold tracking, collection logs, load file QC, production QC and privilege log maintenance. These are the five jobs that land on a paralegal in practice, and each one has a failure mode worth knowing before you meet it.
Open →eDiscovery pricing models compared: what each one meters
Four models are in use, and they differ in what they count rather than in what they charge. A meter tied to volume moves when data moves, one tied to headcount moves when the team moves, and one tied to hours moves when the vendor moves. Which meter you are on decides whether a bill can be forecast.
Open →The eDiscovery process: nine EDRM stages and what each costs
The EDRM model names nine stages, from information governance through to presentation. It is a reference framework rather than a checklist anyone works through in order, and most matters never touch several of the stages at all.
Open →eDiscovery production checklist: 24 items before you hit send
Twenty-four checks to run on a production volume before it leaves, and ten to run on a collection before it is processed. Each one corresponds to a way productions actually fail: a broken load file, a Bates gap, an orphaned attachment, live text under a redaction.
Open →eDiscovery vs digital forensics: the difference and the overlap
eDiscovery asks which documents are relevant and produces them. Digital forensics asks what happened on a device or an account. Most matters need only the first, and the ones that need both need them at the same point, which is collection.
Open →ESI protocols explained: what they cover, and a template
An ESI protocol is the parties' written agreement on how electronic evidence will be preserved, searched, produced and handled, usually entered as a court order. Settled early it costs nothing; settled after a production has gone out in the wrong form, it costs a re-production.
Open →DAT and OPT load files explained: how to read one
A load file is the index that tells the receiving platform what it just received. Most production failures are load file failures, and nearly all of them are caught by reading the first row, checking the encoding, and reconciling the page count before the volume leaves.
Open →Native vs TIFF production: which file types break when imaged
Imaging is reliable for documents whose meaning is on the face of the page and lossy for everything else. Spreadsheets, presentations, chat, audio and databases lose content or cannot be imaged at all, which is why most protocols produce images with a native carve-out.
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