Category: eDiscovery Surveys

In the winter of 2021, eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey more than 50 participants chose to answer at least one of the optional business operational metric survey questions in the quarterly survey. 31.5% of survey respondents reported Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) as increasing in the winter of 2021. This is an incremental increase approaching 10% from the 21.9% reporting DSO as increasing in the fall of 2020. It is also the highest percentage of respondents reporting DSO as increasing since the introduction of business operational metric questions to the eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey in the winter of 2019.

Based on the complexity of data and legal discovery, it is a continual challenge to fully understand what is representative of industry-standard pricing for the delivery of eDiscovery products and services. With this challenge in mind, the semi-annual eDiscovery Pricing Survey is designed to provide insight into eDiscovery pricing through the lens of 12 specific pricing questions answered by legal, business, security, and information professionals operating in the eDiscovery ecosystem. The winter 2021 survey was open from November 21, 2020, until December 3, 2020, and had 79 respondents share their understanding of current pricing for selected eDiscovery services.

In the fall of 2020, 77.2% of eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey respondents felt the current business conditions are good or normal. This combined confidence level represents a 1.1% increase in these same feelings when compared to the summer of 2020 where 76.0% felt the conditions were good or normal. Additionally, exactly 38.6% of survey respondents characterized the current business climate as good. This represents a decrease from 40.0% of respondents who viewed the business climate as good in the summer of 2020. This decrease from the summer of 2020 may represent a cautious concern in the current general business climate for eDiscovery.

In the fall of 2020, 49.4% of respondents viewed budgetary constraints as potentially having the greatest business impact on their business in the next six months. This percentage is the highest of all concerns represented in the survey and also is the third-highest rating for any business performance concern since the inception of the survey. This is also the twelfth time in twenty surveys that the issue of budgetary constraints has been the top concern or tied for the top concern by survey respondents.

In the fall of 2020, eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey more than 70 participants chose to answer at least one of the optional business operational metric survey questions in the quarterly survey. 21.9% of survey respondents reported Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) as increasing in the fall of 2020. This is an incremental increase from the 20.9% reporting DSO as increasing in the summer of 2020 and is the highest percentage of respondents reporting DSO as increasing since the introduction of business operational metric questions to the eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey in the winter of 2019.