Based on the complexity of data and legal discovery, it is a continual challenge to understand the relationships, opportunities, and costs of specific eDiscovery tasks. With this challenge in mind and to provide information and context to discussions around the eDiscovery task of collection, the following collection-centric task, spend, and cost data points may be beneficial to legal, business, and IT professionals considering the economics of eDiscovery.
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 15 specific pricing questions answered by legal, business, security, and information professionals operating in the eDiscovery ecosystem. The summer 2019 survey was open from May 27, 2019, until June 6, 2019, and had 81 respondents share their understanding of the price of admission for access to a market basket of eDiscovery services.
In the spring of 2019, 159 eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey participants chose to answer at least one of the optional business operational metric survey questions in the quarterly survey. Almost 18% (17.6%) of survey respondents reported DSO as increasing in the spring of 2019. This is a strong increase from approximately 10% (10.3%) reporting DSO as increasing in the winter of 2019.
Just under 94% (93.3%) of eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey respondents feel the current business conditions are good or normal in the spring of 2019. This combined confidence level represents a solid increase in these same feelings when compared to the winter of 2019 where 89.3% felt the conditions were good or normal. However, respondents rating the current business conditions as good dropped to 41.1%, the lowest rating in this area since the inception of the survey. This drop appears to represent a solid, yet slowly diminishing optimism in the current general business climate for eDiscovery.
In the Spring 2019 eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey, 25% of respondents viewed increasing volumes of data as potentially having the greatest impact on their business in the next six months. This percentage is the highest of all concerns represented in the survey. Budgetary constraints were also viewed as a considerable issue with 20.6% of survey respondents noting it as their greatest business concern.
This is the fourteenth quarterly eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey conducted by ComplexDiscovery. More than 1,448 individual responses have been received from legal, business, and technology professionals across the eDiscovery ecosystem since the inception of the survey and 180 respondents shared their opinions as part of the spring 2019 survey.
This in-progress overview of three important business metric trajectories is provided as a precursor to the final results of the fourteenth quarterly eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey currently being conducted by ComplexDiscovery. These preliminary results highlight the responses of legal, business, and technology professionals across the eDiscovery ecosystem to three specific business questions regarding days sales outstanding (DSO), monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and customer revenue distribution metrics.
The Predictive Coding Technologies and Protocols Survey is a non-scientific survey designed to help provide a general understanding of the use of predictive coding technologies, protocols, and workflows by data discovery and legal discovery professionals within the eDiscovery ecosystem.
Just under 90% (89.3%) of eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey respondents feel the current business conditions are good or normal. This confidence level represents a significant decrease in these same feelings from the fall of 2018 where 96.5% felt the conditions were good or normal.
In the Winter 2019 eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey, 22.7% of respondents viewed budgetary constraints as potentially having the greatest impact on their business in the next six months. This percentage is the highest of all concerns represented in the survey. Increasing data volume was also viewed as a considerable issue, with 21.3% of survey respondents noting it as their greatest business concern.