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eDiscovery Worksheet

The worksheet below will estimate your projected Exchange-related discovery costs per year.

If you prefer to download this as an Excel spread sheet for your privacy, or so that you may print your results, you may do so here.

Exchange-related discovery can be extremely costly to organizations when all factors and costs are considered. Exchange-related discovery costs include the cost to find, recover and review responsive emails from network storage, the Exchange database, backup tapes and custodian workstations and removable media. Also, the largest cost for most organizations is the legal review of responsive emails.

1) Total number of discoverable custodian mailboxes within your organization?
2) Average number of emails sent and received per day per employee?
3) Average number of months of email to be searched per discovery event
including custodian PSTs? Usually discovery orders specify a bounded timeframe to be searched for responsive emails.
4) Spam reduction factor as a percentage? This is the percentage of the email database that can be quickly discounted as non-responsive to the discovery order.
5) Average percentage of custodian mailboxes effected per discovery event?
6) Automation filtering reduction factor. The percentage the total number of emails to be searched for responsiveness can be reduced by search automation – use 50% if you don’t know
7) Total number of emails including in PSTs that could be subject to discovery
per event. This number is a calculation using the previous inputs to determine the potential number of emails subject to review per discovery event.
8 ) How many email discovery events did your company act on in the past 12
months?
9) What is your projected growth in discovery requests per year as a
percentage?
10) Average time spent in IT hours per discovery event? This includes looking for responsive records in network storage including restoring Email system backup tapes.
11) Average fully loaded salary for an Email Administrator or IT Forensics Tech?
12) Total cost of IT employee hours related to discovery per year
13) Total number of backup tapes restored per discovery event
14) Average cost per tape to restoe and search for responsive content (Current federal case precedent indicates a cost of $3750 to $4300 per tape (Case precent from Bank of America v. SR International Business Insurance Cp. Ltd.))
15) Total annual cost of restoring and searching backup tapes for discovery
16) Due to a discovery hold requirements, how many backup tapes are you
purchasing per year? In some instances, a judge may order the organization being discovered to not recycle their backup tapes until case end.
17) Average per tape cost of backup media (due to litigation hold requirements)?
18) Average cost of tape storage per tape per year?
19) Total cost of purchasing and managing backup tapes for discovery
20) Projected Attorney review efficiency? On the average how many emails per hour can your legal department or your external law firm review for responsiveness?
21) Number of attorney hours required for review of target emails for
responsiveness per event
22) Your average cost of attorney review of emails per hour?
23) Total cost of attorney review for responsiveness
24) If you utilize an external entity for discovery prepardness, what is the
average fee per discovery charged by your outside legal/eDiscovery provider?

Total Projected Cost of Exchange Discovery per year

*please note that if you prefer to download this as an Excel spread sheet so you can share and print your results, you may do so here.