February 12, 2008 - While overbilling clients late last Thursday, "Charge-by-the-Hour" Electronic Discovery, nineteen years old, died.  Well-known in the legal community for its close relationships with "Wasted Man-Hours" and "A Total Lack of Incentive to Finish a Job Quickly and Efficiently," its cause of death remains unclear.

Initial autopsy reports suggest that the death of "By-the-Hour" EDD can be attributed to natural causes, such as market pressures and more reasonable pricing alternatives, but police have yet to rule out spoliation.

Keith Jones, Senior Partner of Jones Dykstra & Associates, was available for immediate comment.

"We're starting to see more and more cases where attorneys abandon this type of EDD pricing structure and embrace its much more efficient, straightforward cousin, ‘Fixed-Price' E-Discovery.  ‘Charge-by-the-Hour' has been on its way out for some time now."

"It's hard," one associate added.  "We didn't know ‘By-the-Hour' so well, but you really never get used to this sort of thing."

JD&A has been a staunch opponent of firms that use "Charge-by-the-Hour" EDD without first considering the alternatives; they believe that a majority of ESI consulting prices can be set and agreed upon before work begins.  JD&A declined to comment, however, on whether their two years of prix fixe collections, processing, and other e-discovery services had anything to do with "By-the-Hour"'s demise.

Jones continues, "If an e-discovery vendor has the right experience, they know exactly how much doing the EDD work costs them.  They know the problems they're likely to encounter, so they don't have to bill hourly for everything, or make up for lost time with assorted charges like ‘machine run-time fees' and other factors that are beyond the attorney's control.  Clients deserve a more responsible pricing structure, and we're trying to give them just that."

"Sam," who preferred that his large, expensive EDD firm remain anonymous, seemed especially affected by the loss of the long-favored pricing structure.  "I still can't believe that it's gone.  I just keep looking over at our outgoing invoices, thinking they'll be full of padded hours, and they're not.  I don't know what we're going to do."

"Sure, we had our differences with ‘Charge-by-the-Hour,'" Keith Jones of JD&A admits.  "Take searching your data, for example.  If your keywords don't return the results you want the first time, ‘By-the-Hour' would charge you again.  But we know that that's just a part of the e-discovery process; sometimes it takes a few tries to get it right, and we're not going to charge you again just because you want to run different search terms."

Jones continues, "Maybe you just need to collect a few laptops or servers; we'll give you the fixed price per machine beforetime so you're not left worrying about how much the collection is really going to cost you.  For most situations, it's only logical that things should be done this way."

"Many of our clients are so used to getting nickeled and dimed by their EDD vendor that we find ourselves saying ‘That's included.  You don't have to pay extra for that,' almost daily," an associate added.  "Personally, I think it's incredible that ‘By-the-Hour' was able to stick around for as long as it did."

If you are an attorney who has previously used only "Charge-by-the-Hour" for your EDD work, Jones urges you to contact JD&A for grief counseling or a project quote.  "There are alternatives," he says.  "I know some attorneys are going to keep pretending that ‘By-the-Hour' E-Discovery isn't dead, just because they think they don't have a choice.  I'm here to tell you that you do."

"Charge-by-the-Hour" E-Discovery is survived by its two closest fiscally-masochistic relatives, "That Gym Membership You Never Use," and "Most Boats."