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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?
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rivera.henry29d ago
One thing I noticed nobody's brought up yet is the storage cost for all those documents. I was on a utility patent case last year and we had to upload everything to a cloud review platform. Each page was like 15 cents just to host and process. Our 100 pages turned into 50,000 after the full dump and that storage fee alone ate up 7 grand before any lawyer even read a word. So when you say you hit 100 pages and realized the budget was off, I think the real shocker is how the infrastructure costs pile up in the background. The partner who set the budget probably never touched the software billing details. That hidden layer of per-page fees can double your total spend without anyone on the legal team noticing until the invoice arrives.
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robin8363mo 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.
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