Confidence Meets Complexity: Full Results from the 2H 2025 eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey

Editor’s Note: Confidence is rising fast across the legal data services landscape—but that confidence now demands accountability. The 2H 2025 eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey reveals an industry that has stabilized post-pandemic and is actively scaling AI-first operations. Yet with growth comes complexity, and the sector’s optimism is colliding with critical gaps in financial visibility and operational discipline.

This article examines the friction between the aggressive deployment of generative AI and the underlying business realities of revenue predictability, margin pressure, and data security. For cybersecurity, information governance, and eDiscovery professionals, it’s a wake-up call: AI may power the future, but only financial clarity and strategic control will keep that future sustainable.

Industry Research

Confidence Meets Complexity: Full Results from the 2H 2025 eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey

ComplexDiscovery Staff

The phase of tentative exploration in legal technology has evolved into a period of focused execution. While theoretical debate continues in some corners regarding the long-term impact of artificial intelligence, the legal data services market has defied expectations in the second half of 2025. It has established a robust, if complicated, financial baseline that signals a maturity in the sector.

According to the full results of the 2H 2025 eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey, the 38th edition of this long-running industry benchmark, the sector has transitioned from post-pandemic volatility to a hardened state of resilience. Sentiment has shifted decisively among the 64 industry leaders surveyed. A robust 59.38% of professionals now rate current business conditions as “good,” a stark contrast to previous years, where “normal” was often the ceiling of optimism. Meanwhile, 37.50% view conditions as “normal,” and only a negligible 3.13% view conditions as “bad.”

This shift represents the solidification of a new operational reality where stability is the platform for aggressive expansion. However, this optimism is nuanced. While the hesitation of previous years has faded, it has been replaced by a more complex challenge: managing the friction between rising confidence and the operational discipline required to sustain it. The data suggests that optimism without financial rigor—specifically in visibility and security—may expose organizations to significant risk.

The Reality of Revenue and the Profit Squeeze

The financial outlook for the remainder of 2025 is characterized by a distinct divergence between revenue and profit—a divergence that demands close attention from executive leadership. While 42.19% of professionals project higher revenues in the coming six months, profit expectations are more tempered. The majority—51.56%—expect revenue to remain flat, while 6.25% anticipate a decline.

However, when looking at the bottom line, the picture tightens significantly. While 37.50% expect higher profits, 50.00% see profits staying the same, and a notable 12.50% expect lower profits—double the rate of those expecting lower revenue.

It is important to note that the outlook remains net-positive—optimists outweigh pessimists by a three-to-one margin. However, the doubling of negative sentiment toward profits (12.50%) compared to revenue (6.25%) suggests a nuanced margin squeeze. As the industry scales, integrating Generative AI is capital-intensive, requiring significant investment in GPU compute and specialized talent. If providers rely solely on traditional pricing models, they risk a “Profitless Prosperity” scenario where they absorb these efficiency gains as costs rather than capturing them as value. Leadership must audit pricing strategies to ensure they account for the high overhead of AI-first workflows.

The Financial Visibility Gap

While confidence is high, the survey exposes a worrying lack of clarity regarding the specific financial levers that sustain operations. A large segment of leadership lacks real-time visibility into Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) and Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR). Specifically, 33.90% of respondents admitted they do not know the trajectory of their organization’s DSO. In an environment where investment in expensive infrastructure is accelerating, this opacity is a critical vulnerability.

Cash flow is the lifeblood of expansion. While MRR appears stable—anchoring the industry’s confidence with 69.49% reporting it as unfluctuating or increasing—DSO is trending in the wrong direction for many. 18.64% report that DSO is increasing (slowing), compared to only 11.86% who see it decreasing.

The danger here is a liquidity crunch in the middle of a boom. If organizations are front-loading costs to build AI capabilities but clients are back-loading payments, the cash gap widens. For operational leaders, the “I Don’t Know” response regarding DSO is unacceptable in a high-interest-rate environment. Implementing real-time dashboards that link technical project completion directly to invoicing triggers can help close this gap, ensuring that the pace of billing matches the pace of work.

The Shift from Pilot to Production

If 2024 was defined by curiosity, the second half of 2025 is defined by deployment. A commanding 64.06% of respondents report that their organizations are currently “Integrating and Deploying” Large Language Models (LLMs). The “Considering” phase has shrunk to 18.75%, while only 10.94% remain in the “Testing/Piloting” stage.

Contrary to widespread fears of commoditization, the primary driver for this adoption is not cost-cutting. The majority of respondents (54.69%) cite improved service and product delivery as the main benefit, with only 12.50% pointing to cost savings. However, this deployment has created a trust gap. The single largest barrier to success remains accuracy, with nearly one-third (32.81%) of professionals citing hallucinations and data reliability as their primary concern—far outweighing “High Costs” (18.75%) or “Unclear ROI” (17.19%).

This disconnect between adoption (high) and trust (low) suggests that while the technology is ready for deployment, the process is often lagging. The market is hungry for verification, not just calculation. The next competitive battleground will not be who has the fastest AI, but who has the most defensible quality control workflow wrapped around it. For eDiscovery professionals, this means the role of reviewer is evolving into validator, requiring a higher tier of subject matter expertise to spot subtle hallucinations that a standard review might miss.

The Three-Headed Monster: Volume, Variety, and Budget

The strategic landscape is currently dominated by a collision of three opposing forces: exploding data volumes, expanding data complexity, and rigid budgetary constraints. When asked to identify the issue most likely to impact business, respondents produced a statistical deadlock that underscores the tension in the market. “Increasing Volumes of Data” took the top spot, cited by 23.44% of respondents, but it holds that position by a razor-thin margin. Right on its heels are “Increasing Types of Data” and “Budgetary Constraints,” which are tied exactly at 21.88%.

This statistical tie is the most telling finding of the survey. It confirms that there is no single dominant problem; rather, the challenge is the interaction of these three forces. You cannot solve the volume problem by throwing money at it (due to budget constraints), and you cannot solve the budget problem by standardizing workflows (because of the increasing variety of data types, such as collaboration logs and ephemeral messaging).

For Information Governance (IG) professionals, this three-headed monster is a mandate for upstream intervention. If data is not culled and governed before it enters the eDiscovery funnel, downstream costs will exceed the budget. IG leaders must use this data to advocate for stricter data minimization policies, positioning governance not as a compliance box-check, but as a critical cost-control mechanism.

The Security Blind Spot

Perhaps the most alarming finding in the 2H 2025 survey is the low prioritization of data security. Despite a landscape rife with cyber threats, “Data Security” was cited as the top issue by only 9.38% of respondents (visible in the chart above). In the rush to capitalize on favorable business conditions and integrate powerful AI tools, the industry appears to be treating security as a baseline assumption rather than an active risk.

This complacency is a potential vector for disaster. As organizations open their environments to LLMs and third-party integrations, the attack surface expands exponentially. Cybercriminals are adept at exploiting the financial opacity mentioned earlier, using business email compromise (BEC) to target organizations with lax financial oversight. Cybersecurity leaders must view the low prioritization of security in this survey not as a sign of safety, but as a flashing red light. They must forcefully insert themselves into the AI procurement process to ensure that the drive for “Improved Service Delivery” does not inadvertently open backdoors into sensitive client data.

Navigating the Friction: Scenario Planning for 2026

The picture that emerges from the 2H 2025 data is one of an ecosystem on steady ground but under high tension. The market is resilient, revenue is growing, and technology is being adopted at scale. Yet, strategic leaders must look beyond the immediate data to potential risk vectors.

One such vector is the regulatory environment. While business confidence is high, organizations should scenario-plan for potential shifts in federal enforcement priorities. Government investigations have historically been significant drivers of high-volume, price-insensitive work—often referred to as the “whales” of the industry. If a shift in the political landscape leads to a cooling of federal investigations, the industry could face a revenue gap, even if commercial litigation remains steady. In this scenario, replacing one massive investigation with multiple smaller commercial matters would require higher administrative overhead for potentially lower margins.

The winners of the next six months will be those who reconcile these conflicts—between data growth and flat budgets, and between optimism and the potential for market shifts. As the industry races toward 2026, the question is no longer whether AI will transform the legal sector, but whether the business models supporting that transformation are agile enough to navigate whatever regulatory reality emerges.

Appendix: The Demographics of Decision-Making

To fully understand the weight of these insights, one must look closely at who is speaking. Conducted between September 30 and November 15, 2025, the survey captures the pulse of a heavily U.S.-centric market, with 90.63% of participants operating primarily in North America. The respondents represent the practical backbone of the industry, heavily weighted toward executive leadership.

• Robinson, R., & Robinson, H. (2025). 2H 2025 eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey by ComplexDiscovery OÜ and EDRM. ComplexDiscovery OÜ.
• Data Volumes vs. Budgets: Core Conflicts from the 2H 2025 eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey
• The Visibility Gap: Operational Metrics and Financial Health in the 2H 2025 eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey
• The Shift from AI Pilots to Production: Insights from the 2H 2025 eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey
• Steady Ground, Higher Ground: eDiscovery Business Confidence and Financial Outlooks in 2H 2025

Assisted by GAI and LLM Technologies

Additional Reading

• 1H 2025 eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey Results Released by ComplexDiscovery OÜ and EDRM
• eDiscovery Survey Archives of ComplexDiscovery
• eDisclosure Systems Buyers Guide – Online Knowledge Base

Source: ComplexDiscovery OÜ