Find some helpful advice about budgeting for litigation support efforts from Mark Lieb & his company, Ad Litem Consulting:
"Creating a budget for litigation technology goods and services is not an easy chore. Before electronic discovery, one could multiply the number of boxes by 2,500 and estimate the page count. An industry average of 3 pages per document was generally sufficient for estimating the costs for any special treatments, such as bibliographic coding. Electronic discovery changed this.
"While a ‘pages per box’ ratio is simple, it is more difficult to estimate the total number of pages by the total GBs. This is because the format and content of electronic discovery can be as varied as the number of software titles which run on anyone’s computer. A GB of one type of file may yield thousands of pages, while another file type would only yield hundreds or dozens of pages. This makes any generalized pages per GB ratio almost useless. Fortunately, the bulk of ediscovery is of a single file type, email, and this is an estimate, after all. Therefore, one can create a fair estimate based upon the pages per email ratio."
For more details, take a look through Mark’s book, Litigation Support Department.