eDiscovery for small law firms: what you need and what it costs

A firm of three to twenty lawyers needs four things from eDiscovery: a 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. What it costs turns almost entirely on volume and duration: the market bills processing once, per gigabyte, and hosting every month the matter stays open, at roughly $5 to $15 per GB per month.

Throughout this guide, a small firm means three to twenty lawyers. That is a scoping convention for this page rather than an industry definition, and the arithmetic below does not depend on where the boundary falls.

What does a small law firm actually need for eDiscovery?

Four capabilities, in the order a matter uses them.

A defensible collection. Data has to come off the source without being altered, with a record of what was taken, from whom and when. This is the step a firm is least able to redo, because the evidence of what was collected is created at the moment of collection or not at all.

Processing into a searchable set. Containers become documents, text and metadata are extracted, and an index is built. Nothing downstream works without it.

A review platform your own people can drive. Search, batching, coding, redaction and privilege tagging, with an audit trail of who did what. The test is not the feature list; it is whether your paralegal can run a search and export a production without a support ticket.

Productions that meet a specification you did not write. The other side’s ESI protocol sets the form, and a document production either complies or gets sent back. Re-producing a corrected volume is the most avoidable cost in the process.

That is the list. It does not include most of what an enterprise procurement exercise weighs.

Which enterprise eDiscovery features can a small firm skip?

Three of the nineteen fee types in the Fee Field Guide attach to capabilities a small firm frequently pays for and rarely uses.

AI and analytics surcharges meter technology-assisted review, predictive coding and concept search. These earn their keep on collections large enough that linear review is impossible. On a matter a small team can read, the surcharge buys speed you were not going to need.

Per-seat user licenses charge by headcount rather than by use. A firm that adds a contract reviewer for six weeks pays for the seat, which is a charge that lands exactly when you are busiest.

Bundled project management hours pay for a vendor to run the platform on your behalf. That is genuinely valuable when nobody at the firm will own the work, which is the service bureau case below. It is dead weight when someone will.

None of these is a bad product. They are priced for an organization with a litigation support function, and a three to twenty lawyer firm usually does not have one.

How much should eDiscovery cost a 3 to 20 lawyer firm?

There is no single number, because the two largest fees are meters rather than prices. What a firm can do is know which meter is running and how often.

Capabilities a 3 to 20 lawyer firm needs, against how the market bills each

Capability	Needed by a small firm	How the market bills it
Collection	Yes, on every matter	Per custodian, per source, or hourly forensic rates
Processing	Yes, once per ingestion	One-time per GB
Hosting	Yes, for the life of the matter	Recurring per GB per month, roughly $5 to $15
Review platform access	Yes	Per seat per month, or included in a platform license
Production and export	Yes, per production	Per GB, per page, or per production
Project management	Only if nobody owns the platform	Hourly, discretionary
AI and analytics	Rarely, at small-firm volumes	Surcharge per matter per month

Ranges are from the Fee Field Guide dataset, which draws its hosting and processing figures from the ComplexDiscovery eDiscovery Pricing Survey. They are ranges, not quotes, and the eDiscovery cost guide sets out each fee in full. How those models compare against one another is the subject of the pricing models comparison.

The pattern that matters for a small firm is the shape rather than the level. Processing is charged once. Hosting is charged every month, on every gigabyte, including the gigabytes nobody will ever open. A matter that settles in three months and a matter that runs three years carry the same processing fee and very different hosting totals.

When is a service bureau still the right answer?

When nobody at the firm will own the platform.

A review platform is software. A service bureau is the people who operate it for you. The distinction shows up on the invoice rather than in the product: a self-service platform lets your team run searches, batches and exports directly, while a bureau routes those tasks through project managers billed by the hour.

For a firm with one or two matters a year, the bureau model is often simply correct. There is no platform to amortize, no one to train, and the hourly rate buys experience the firm has no reason to build. The failure mode is the opposite case: a firm with steady matter volume paying hourly for work it could do itself, on data it is also paying to host.

The question to ask is not which is cheaper per hour. It is whether anyone at the firm will own the work. If the honest answer is no, a platform license buys a tool nobody will pick up.

What does one matter cost a five-lawyer firm?

An illustrative arithmetic, using the cost calculator defaults rather than any measurement of what small firms carry.

Take three active matters at 60 GB each, which is the calculator’s default matter size, for 180 GB held in total. At the midpoint of the published hosting range, that is a recurring monthly charge against the full 180 GB for as long as the matters stay open, plus a one-time processing charge on each gigabyte as it arrives, plus a seat charge for everyone who needs access.

The reason to run it rather than read it is that three of those inputs are yours, not the market’s: how many matters are open at once, how long they stay open, and how many people need access. Change the duration alone and the total moves more than any rate negotiation would.

How this works on a flat rate

Kavarn, the flat-rate eDiscovery service Konvergence Inc operates, prices the platform rather than the gigabyte: one published monthly rate per private instance on a 12-month agreement, with no per-GB processing or hosting charge, no per-user fee, and productions included. The pricing page carries the rate itself.

For a small firm the relevant number is where that crosses over. Break-even sits at roughly 130 to 400 GB across all active matters, for a firm with six users and four hours of project management a month, at $5 to $15 per GB hosting. Below that band, per-gigabyte billing is cheaper and you should stay on it. Above it, the gap widens with every custodian the other side adds and every reviewer you bring on.

The band is wide because the market range is wide. Where a given firm falls inside it depends on the hosting rate it actually pays, which is on its own invoice rather than in any survey. The pricing page publishes every fee, and the cost calculator runs the comparison on your own figures. See what the platform includes, or book a walkthrough.

Sources

• Fee ranges and categories: the Fee Field Guide dataset, drawing hosting and processing figures from ComplexDiscovery, eDiscovery Pricing Survey (semi-annual).
• RAND Institute for Civil Justice, Where the Money Goes: Understanding Litigant Expenditures for Producing Electronic Discovery (Pace & Zakaras, 2012), on the share of eDiscovery cost attributable to review.
• Break-even figure: computed from our own published rate and the market defaults in pricing.json, as shown on the flat-rate page comparison.
• Matter size and volume defaults: volume.json, as used by the cost calculator.