7 July 2011 — In his article, “Accounting for the Costs of Electronic Discovery,” David Degnan states that conducting electronic discovery “may cost upwards of $30,000 per gigabyte.”   That is a lot of money for discovery, particularly considering that the number of gigabytes we are seeing per case seems to keep increasing.

Much of Degnan’s analysis turns on how many documents (files actually) you can expect to find in a gigabyte of data. As he points out, review costs make up nearly 60% of the total costs for e-discovery. If a reviewer can only get through an average of 50 documents per hour (as Degnan suggests), the number of documents likely to be found per gigabyte of data becomes important to understanding the costs of electronic discovery.

For an analysis by John Tredennick of Catalyst click here.