Document review alone costs $42.1 billion a year in the US — more than 80% of litigation spend. Yet per-GB eDiscovery pricing runs from $29 to $135 with invoices nobody can benchmark.
The spreadsheet arrived on a Thursday afternoon, and the general counsel of a Fortune 500 industrial company did what general counsels do: she went straight to the biggest number. Litigation budget for the year, nine figures, with a single line near the bottom she could not explain.
"eDiscovery," it said. "$3.8 million."
She asked the outside law firm what, exactly, that covered. The answer took four calls, two spreadsheets of its own, and a week. Processing. Hosting. User licenses. Review. Something called TIFFing. Each billed in different units, at different rates, by different vendors, none of them quoted up front. The number was real. The components were a fog.
She is not alone. According to an American Bar Association estimate cited by Logikcull, document review alone accounts for more than 80 percent of total US litigation spend — $42.1 billion a year. Not eDiscovery. Just the review portion of it. Forty-two billion dollars of corporate money flowing through a market where the price of anything is known only after the invoice arrives.
Ask what eDiscovery costs and the honest answer is a range so wide it ceases to be an answer. Per-gigabyte processing fees run from $29 to $135 a gigabyte, depending on the vendor, the matter, and seemingly the phase of the moon. A vendor estimate published by Reveal — Logikcull's parent company — listed the standard menu: $135 per gigabyte for processing, $10 per gigabyte per month for hosting, $80 per user per month for licenses, $350 per gigabyte for TIFFing (the conversion of files into image format for review), and $125 an hour for technical assistance in 30-minute increments.
Stack those on a real matter and the arithmetic gets brutal. Logikcull's own eDiscovery Cost Calculator ran a modest hypothetical — a 25-gigabyte case, six months of discovery, ten reviewers — and priced it three ways. Logikcull's flat $40-per-gigabyte rate produced $3,125. A traditional service provider came in at $28,875. Same documents. Same reviewers. Same six months. More than nine times the cost, and the calculator's authors made no attempt to say the expensive option was better. It was priced differently.
That spread is the story. The per-gigabyte model bills by volume, not by work. Data expands — emails get duplicated, spreadsheets balloon when extracted, a rolling production "explodes" as archives unpack — and the meter keeps running on gigabytes the client never agreed to create. Logikcull's blog tells the story of a 2016 case against United Airlines where a vendor took 24 hours to process three gigabytes of data, blowing a production deadline and drawing a verbal shellacking from the presiding judge. Three gigabytes. Twenty-four hours. The client paid for the machine's time, not the result.
The opacity survives partly because the totals are staggering enough to hide in. The RAND Institute, reviewing thousands of cases, found that eDiscovery consumes up to 40 percent of litigation budgets, with 75 percent of that spend going to review-related work. ComplexDiscovery's reconciled market sizing puts the worldwide eDiscovery market at $19.61 billion in 2025, projected to reach $28.08 billion by 2030 at a 7.44 percent compound annual rate. Cambridge's survey of the legal-tech literature puts discovery's share at between one-third and one-half of all litigation costs in cases where discovery is actively employed. The IAALS case allocation paper, drawing on the same RAND work, confirmed review at 73 percent of total eDiscovery cost — the single largest line in any litigated matter.
None of those figures tell a general counsel what her case will cost. And that is precisely the gap. There are no comparable sales, no published rate cards that hold up, no equivalent of a Kelley Blue Book for the single most expensive phase of litigation. The quarterly eDiscovery Pricing Survey run by ComplexDiscovery and EDRM collects scattered quotes, but it is a survey, not a market. A GC shopping for processing is doing what car buyers did in 1970: asking a salesman what the car costs and getting three different answers for the same car.
The obvious question is why the most sophisticated legal departments in the world tolerate this. One reason is incentives. Outside counsel, who traditionally select the vendors, often pass the cost through to clients — sometimes with a markup baked in as an "administrative fee." Logikcull's own blog walks law firms through the math of a $60,000 annual software subscription split across 60 matters as a $1,000-per-matter client charge: the firm isn't eating the cost, so the urgency to minimize it is muted.
Another is that a little opacity has always served both sides of the table. Vendors compete on relationships and service, not price, and a quote that can't be compared is a quote that can't be beaten. Law firms keep the vendor relationship warm because when a bet-the-company matter lands at 4 p.m. on a Friday, you call the people you know.
And to be fair — here is the counterweight — Logikcull's transparency pitch is itself a sales pitch. Reveal bought Logikcull precisely to sell the flat-fee alternative to the metered model. Every vendor with a calculator has a pricing structure to promote. Some matters genuinely are heterogeneous: a simple contracts case and a sprawling antitrust investigation are not the same product, and no benchmark will flatten that difference entirely. The GC who demands a fixed price for discovery on a matter that might double in scope will find vendors suddenly unwilling to answer the phone.
But heterogeneity explains variation. It does not explain a 9x spread on an identical hypothetical, or per-gigabyte processing quotes that differ by a factor of four. That is not complexity pricing. That is pricing power without a benchmark to check it.
Consider what changed when other opaque markets got their first honest reference. Airline fares were a mystery until consolidators published them. Health-care prices are still partly mysterious, but the first cost-transparency studies moved them faster than a decade of hearings. A credible public benchmark for eDiscovery costs — real per-gigabyte processing rates, real hosting fees, real review costs, by matter size and type — would do three things at once.
First, it would hand general counsels leverage they have never had: the ability to walk into a vendor negotiation carrying market data instead of last year's invoice. Second, it would force the metered model to compete on something other than relationships, accelerating the shift toward flat-fee and subscription pricing that Logikcull, DISCO, and Everlaw are already testing. Third, it would make matter budgeting honest. A GC who can predict discovery spend within 20 percent can reserve for it, settle earlier when the math says settle, and hold outside counsel to a number — instead of writing "eDiscovery: $3.8 million" on a spreadsheet and hoping the components add up.
That Thursday-afternoon spreadsheet did not get answered. It got a new version next year, with a bigger number on the same unexplained line. Until the market that produces it can be priced in public, it will keep growing in the dark — $42 billion at a time.
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