Legal data management costs can go out of control when teams lack a clear strategy for collecting, preserving, and searching data efficiently. The good news is that overspending is preventable. With the right processes, tools, and a platform built for the scale of today's digital workplace, you can save money.
According to a Gartner Survey, only 20% of legal matters sent to outside counsel actually stay within budget. That means eight out of ten matters run over. For General Counsel and CLOs managing tighter budgets every year, this systemic problem can affect your profit margins.
Uncontrolled eDiscovery collection costs are one of the biggest drivers of those overruns. If your team is still patching together collections case by case, your spending will only get worse. Onna was built to solve exactly this problem. As the leading data management platform for eDiscovery, we enable legal and IT teams to start managing data more effectively.
Strong legal data management is built on four foundational principles. Each one directly impacts cost, risk, and efficiency across every matter your team handles.
Preservation means placing legal holds on relevant data before it is lost, overwritten, or deleted. Failing to preserve data early creates spoliation risk.
Unfortunately, spoliation sanctions can be far more expensive than the cost of proper preservation tools. An efficient legal data management platform automates hold notifications and tracks custodian acknowledgments, eliminating the need for manual follow-up.
Collection is where eDiscovery collections costs most often spiral. Collecting too broadly inflates review volumes and drives up costs at every downstream stage. Precision collection tools that filter by date range, custodian, keyword, and data type dramatically reduce costs.
Once data is collected, your team needs to find what matters fast. Real-time indexing and precision search across all data sources is what makes a modern legal data management platform efficient.
Every action taken on legal data must be logged, auditable, and defensible in court. A broken chain of custody can undermine an entire case.
According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million. This figure shows exactly how much is at stake when data security and documentation protocols break down.
Enterprise-grade security combined with a defensible audit trail is a non-negotiable foundation for any digital communications data management strategy. When every access, collection, and transfer is continuously logged, your team can demonstrate due diligence to opposing counsel and the court at any stage of a matter.
Overspending is almost always the result of reactive, unstructured data practices. Here are the most effective strategies for bringing costs under control:
These practices require a platform designed for cost reduction in legal tech. Implementing them consistently across your legal department will help you save money over time.
Yes, this feature is one of the highest-value capabilities a modern legal data management platform provides. When your data is indexed in real time and searchable before a matter opens, your team can run scoping searches to estimate and review:
Legal teams that conduct pre-matter data scoping reduce total eDiscovery collection costs. This measure gives you credibility in budget conversations with leadership. Instead of asking for an open-ended discovery budget, you can present a data-backed estimate grounded in actual collection parameters.
Proving ROI on efficient legal data management tools requires you to track the right metrics. Here is what matters most:
Presenting these metrics to leadership helps ensure proper budgeting. As a result, it positions your legal team as a strategic, cost-conscious function.
Making a lot of time savings is achievable and measurable. Manual data collection across multiple platforms can take days or weeks per matter. A unified platform with real-time indexing reduces that to hours.
Apart from collection, precision search eliminates the hours spent manually reviewing irrelevant data. When your team can search across all data sources in a single interface with filters by custodian, date, app, and keyword, the volume of data reaching human review drops. Less review volume means lower outside counsel spend.
Yes, it can. Sanctions for spoliation, missed evidence, and broken chain of custody are expensive and case-damaging. A platform with defensible legal holds, automated custodian tracking, and a complete audit trail removes the human gaps that create sanctions risk.
Missed evidence is an equal risk. When collaboration data from project management tools isn't collected and indexed, relevant communications can't surface during review. A unified platform that covers all major apps ensures nothing is left behind.
Yes, you can do it with legal data management. When your data is centralized, indexed, and searchable, prior collections become reusable assets. Building a reusable strategy starts with standardizing your custodian universe, data source mapping, and collection protocols.
If you want to win the cost battle in eDiscovery, you don't need the biggest budget. All you need is a platform that unifies your legal data management.
Onna's data collection platform connects to 30-plus collaboration apps with market-leading connectors that no competitor has matched. Our configurable data ingestion lets your team collect precisely what you need and nothing more, cutting review volume and downstream costs. With adaptable exports in every format your team needs, rapid cross-platform search, and SOC2 Type II-attested security infrastructure, Onna is the only platform that gives legal and IT teams genuine control over unstructured data.
Contact us today to request a demo.