Kazeon Chops eDiscovery Prices
January 21, 2009
You know that the white shoe world of legal eagles is preparing for a tough year when eDiscovery outfits cut their prices. Lawyers once spent like mad in the name of due diligence and maybe a little thought about billing. The clients would pay and pay and pay. After all, who wants to wear an orange jumpsuit on the TV news or be immortalized on a Web site marching off to court? Law firm customers — sorry, clients, a more upscale word — are pushing back. Big companies are taking some of the work back inside the company’s walls. The outputs go to law firms who will keeps costs within certain parameters (a fancy word to describe a budget). How do I know these changes are underway? Easy. I got a briefing from an eDiscovery vendor last week and that outfit told me that it was making headway against high end eDiscovery vendors. The issue was cost. Price seemed to be this company’s strategic weapon. Today (January 20, 2009) I read in Byte and Switch here that “Kazeon Cuts Costs of Entry Level eDiscovery”. Paul Travis reports that a company can jump into eDiscovery for as little as $10,000. Keep in mind that a perpetual license still costs $80,000 a year. For me, the most important comment in the article was:
…There are more than 100 e-discovery vendors and that more are expected to enter the market this year. The result has been customer confusion and “led to a customer demand for clarity around e-discovery products, and for full integration around the e-discovery workflow process.
With the LegalTech trade show looming, I expect more cost cutting announcements. I am assuming that the show takes place. Rumor has it that one Gartner content management show has been postponed (a big word for shut down). Cost is on a number of professionals’ radar and the pricing for eDiscovery systems will be one indicator of the robustness of the content processing services sector.
Stephen Arnold, January 21, 2009
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