2020 e-Discovery & Litigation Support Survey Results Helps Firms Compare and Improve Recovery Models

Law firm leaders know e-Discovery and litigation support costs have spiraled out of control because of the exponential increase in data volumes, but firms struggle with a legacy practice of writing off litigation support/e-Discovery and related costs. The costs are simply too high to continue this practice, with no abatement in sight.

While litigation support and e-Discovery strategies vary widely, some firms recover more than double what others are.

The first step in optimizing your recoveries is knowing where you stand. That is why Mattern designed the 2020 e-Discovery and Litigation Support Cost Recovery Survey, a first-of-kind survey to produce the unbiased data firms need to develop a culturally-fit recovery strategy. We are thrilled to announce the Survey results are in.

The Survey investigates in-house, outsourced and hybrid recovery models and captures key data to illustrate market trends and success in terms of recovery rates of various models firms are deploying, including these:

  • How firms are structuring litigation support and e-Discovery departments
  • Why firms outsource, insource or leverage hybrid models
  • Methodologies firms use to recover these costs
  • What charges clients pushing back on, refusing to pay and more

The Survey notes the growing demand for services and shows most firms provide litigation support services onsite with in-house labor.  When firms outsource these services, they do so to improve expense recovery, expertise and security.

The recovery of soft costs for in-house services, however, are more difficult to recover than hard costs when services are outsourced. This aligns with other areas of law firm cost recovery where in-house generated soft charges still face the hurdle of being written off by attorneys before making it to the invoice and billed to the client. Hard costs are much more likely to make it to the client invoice. 

Only Survey participants get access to the full survey results, but non-participating firms can request an overview here.

2021-08-06T16:18:32+00:00