Postage Stamps, a Pint of Milk and eDiscovery

Postage Stamps

When I go on holiday, I still like to send postcards which are (and will always) remain far superior to a WhatsApp message, or any other form of social media interaction you care to mention. Just ask those lucky, lucky few who received my 3D kangaroo cards from Australia last year.

To send cards you obviously need stamps, and we instinctively understand the difference between a 1st and 2nd class stamp, though I’m pretty sure you may have no idea as to what they cost (£1.70 and £0.87 respectively at the time of writing).  You are buying time, not quality. The letter will travel in the same manner, handled by the same infrastructure, delivered by probably the same person and fall through the same letter box.  The only variable is speed, and you pay for the privilege of getting your letter delivered post-haste.

So that got me thinking… what matters most to your eDiscovery project: cost or speed? And don’t pretend you can have both without some form of trade off. 

For all the talk of service tiers, premium offerings, enhanced workflows and differentiated pricing models, the truth is much simpler: most providers are offering broadly the same core service.  The same platforms, the same technology stack, the same processing workflows, and the same machine learning tools. The essential variable is time and, especially for lawyers advising clients under pressure, recognising this reality can unlock better strategic decisions and more transparent cost control.

The eDiscovery Offering is Largely Standardised

Despite some marketing claims to the contrary, the mechanics of eDiscovery across the UK market (and globally) are well defined.

Most established providers now operate with:

• Comparable processing engines
• Similar analytics toolkits
• The same review platforms
• Broadly aligned workflows for processing, filtering, searching, TAR, AI and document review
• Industry standard production formats

In other words, the computer-driven input and output are largely consistent, regardless of which provider is engaged.  This is not a criticism: it is a natural consequence of industry maturity. Clients in 2026 would never tolerate wildly different approaches to de-duplication and production formats.  So, if someone promises faster processing, quicker prioritisation, more people allocated immediately, extended hours, and work moved to the front of the operational queue, they are selling time.  Just like a 1st class stamp.

Unfortunately, equating faster turnaround with a “higher quality” service is misleading. The same tools and workflows are being used: the difference is simply that they are being deployed sooner, with higher levels of resourcing, and with a greater sense of urgency.  Legal teams would do well to reframe their conversations with providers having appreciated this, as clients may not be paying for a superior level of eDiscovery sophistication. They are paying for speed of execution, nothing more, and then hoping that nothing goes wrong, despite the fact that this typically happens when things get rushed.

Milk

However, should the focus also be on something else apart from time?  Most of you won’t know that my favourite drink is a pint of milk (preferably with a plate of chocolate biscuits).  A pint of milk is another standardised product which we all understand, but it is also very different from a postage stamp.  The price you pay for a pint of milk is driven by quality rather than speed of delivery, if for no other reason than you can’t speed up the cow element of the equation.

The milk in eDiscovery is the team who you engage with: are they simply taking your requests and pushing (hopefully) the right buttons, or are they providing a genuine consulting service?  That is assuming you even want the latter kind of support, which is not always required, in which case you are probably best-off sticking with a 1st class stamp and a pint of skimmed own-label milk.

I would argue that the most important element of your project isn’t speed or cost or the latest technology marvel (LLMs and AI anyone?) but early engagement with a team who are consultancy-led and understand project management. Then, take the time to explain to them your strategy, what you are looking to achieve and what “good” looks like to you, before taking time to consider their recommendations and advice.

If you understand that the underlying service is the same, once you strip out the people, you can use that to drive your decision-making and use speed strategically when it really matters.  The key is explicit, informed planning, not defaulting to the fastest (and probably most expensive) choice, simply because it was presented as the superior offering.

Ask yourself: who is going to do the actual work; have you spoken to or met these people, or just someone who works with them, or are you just hoping that it will simply be “all right on the night”?

Conclusion

It may well be that a 2nd class stamp and a pint of full-fat organic Jersey milk is where you really want to be.  If that is the case, I can also help with the biscuits.