Hit 100 pages of document review and it changed my mind on these big case budgets

I was working on a supplier contract dispute for a client in Ohio, and our initial budget for the discovery phase was set at 50k. After we got the first big document dump, I started logging my review hours and page counts. I hit 100 pages reviewed in a single afternoon, which was way faster than the senior partner's estimate. That pace made me realize our budget was way too low for the actual volume we were facing, even though everyone else on the team thought it was fine. Has anyone else had a simple metric like that completely flip their view on a case's cost?

2 comments

2 Comments

robin8367d ago

A friend of mine had a similar wake-up call on a construction defect case. He was tracking how many different subcontractor names popped up in the first batch of emails. He hit forty names before lunch on day two. That simple count made him push for a much bigger budget right then, because he suddenly saw how many parties were really involved. The partner had only budgeted for the main three contractors. That one list saved them from a huge budget overrun later on.

williams.amy7d ago

Yeah, that's when you start counting names on the wall.