Where the Money Actually Goes: Review Is 80% of the Bill

When a corporation burns $3 million on a single case's electronic discovery, the money rarely goes to software. It goes to people sitting in front of screens. According to figures attributed to the American Bar Association, document review accounts for over 80% of total litigation spend — roughly $42 billion a year. ACEDS calls review "the most expensive phase of an e-discovery project because of the human element and the time involved."

The math is blunt. ACEDS offers a worked example: 100,000 documents at a 500-documents-per-day pace is 2,000 hours of reviewer time. At $100/hour, that's $200,000 for a single reviewer — before processing fees, hosting, or project management. And adding reviewers doesn't fix it, as ACEDS notes: total review time still has to be spent; you're just spreading it across more paychecks.

An honest caveat: these benchmarks come from the civil eDiscovery market. Corporate document dumps, contract attorneys, per-gigabyte hosting — that's the world the $42 billion figure describes. None of the industry surveys measure criminal-defense discovery. But if you defend people for a living, you already know the underlying cost driver is identical, because it isn't documents. It's hours of human review time.

Your discovery just wears different clothes:

• Bodycam and dashcam footage — hours of video nobody on a flat fee has time to watch twice
• Jail calls and 911 audio that arrive as unsearchable media files
• Interrogation video where the suppression issue lives in minute 94, not minute 1
• Scanned police reports with no text layer — PDFs you can't even search, let alone cross-reference against the footage

The civil market can throw $200,000 of contract-review labor at a document dump. A solo defender or a public-defender office cannot. The flat fee you quoted covers the preliminary hearing, the motion to suppress, the cross-exam prep — and every hour spent scrubbing through bodycam looking for the moment the report contradicts is an hour billed at zero.

That's the real reason review dominates the bill: the expensive part was never the data, it was finding the twenty seconds that matter inside it. The civil eDiscovery world is now pricing AI-assisted review at a competitive $0.11–$0.50 per document, per the Winter 2026 EDRM pricing survey — an acknowledgment that the industry itself sees hours-of-human-attention as the cost problem to solve.

The criminal-defense equivalent isn't per-document review. It's getting a timestamped, searchable transcript of every jail call and a report-vs-bodycam comparison surfaced before anyone asks — so the $100/hour question ("what actually happened at 11:42 p.m.?") costs minutes, not a weekend. That's the workflow Evidence Copilot is built around: the expensive hours get spent on judgment, not on scrubbing.

The Pricing Landscape: Per-GB Traps, Hourly Rates, and Hidden Fees

Ask three vendors what eDiscovery costs and you'll get three different numbers — because the pricing models themselves are designed to make comparison hard. The benchmarks below come from the civil eDiscovery market, but they explain a problem criminal-defense teams know intimately: you cannot budget a flat-fee case when your review costs are metered by the gigabyte.

Software quotes cluster in two shapes. According to Software Advice's advisor-call data, flat monthly pricing typically runs $500–$2,000/month with a median near $2,000, while per-user pricing typically runs $100–$250 per user/month with a median near $225. Service-side rates are steeper still: the Winter 2026 EDRM pricing survey anchors forensic collection at $250–$350/hour, with investigation and analysis at $350–$550/hour and expert testimony frequently exceeding $550/hour.

Then come the hidden fees. Processing alone runs $25–$100 per gigabyte depending on plan, and industry analysis notes that data processing, integrations, early case assessment, and preservation all add expense beyond the headline number.

The sharpest warning in the survey data is about licensing fragmentation:

• A provider offering $5/GB storage plus $150/user monthly access fees may actually cost more than one charging $15/GB with unlimited user access.
• Only 40% of Fortune 1000 inside counsel using cost-cutting tactics could actually measure their savings — many figures were "only vague estimates."
• Over 80% of total litigation spend goes to document review — roughly $42 billion per year, per the ABA.

For a defender, the math is unforgiving. A murder case arrives with 40 hours of bodycam, three jail-call dumps, and a scanned police report stack — and per-GB or per-document billing means the bill scales with the prosecution's production, not your fee. ACEDS notes that volume is the single biggest cost driver, and FTI Technology frames cost prediction as "a continuing challenge and an increasing necessity."

That opacity is why Evidence Copilot publishes its pricing outright — Solo at $39/user/month, Firm at $99/user/month, and a PD Office tier at $750/attorney/year — with overage metered and hard-capped at 3x included hours so a runaway discovery dump cannot overbill a flat-fee case. Every plan includes the full workspace; there are no feature tiers to negotiate. You can see the full breakdown at evidencecopilot.com/pricing, book a 20-minute walkthrough, or start on the Solo plan at evidencecopilot.com/signup.

Why GenAI Review Pricing Is Changing — and What It Still Can't Do

The Winter 2026 EDRM pricing survey puts a hard number on something defenders have been watching happen in real time: GenAI-assisted review has settled into a competitive zone of $0.11–$0.50 per document — pricing that, per the survey, "directly challenges traditional human review economics." Hybrid models and per-document billing each now account for roughly 28% of primary pricing structures.

But the market isn't uniformly sold. Everlaw's analysis strikes a more skeptical note, arguing that GenAI being "consistently relied upon is still a ways off" — and that the technology carries its own costs on top of existing review spend. Both takes can be true. The pricing zone exists; the trust hasn't caught up.

For criminal-defense work, that gap matters more than it does in civil litigation. The real question isn't whether AI review is cheaper than a contract attorney at $50/hour. It's whether the AI's output is grounded — whether you can verify it before it touches a motion, a cross-exam outline, or a Brady letter.

That verification standard looks like this:

• Every answer cites the exact source — the second of bodycam footage or the page of the police report — not a vague "the video shows."
• AI output is marked AI-generated, so nothing generated ever masquerades as attorney work product.
• Everything stays pending human review. The tool narrows the haystack; the attorney decides what the needle means.
• Originals stay immutable, so the underlying evidence is never altered in the process.

This is the design logic behind grounded review workspaces like Evidence Copilot, where the AI evidence agent answers with clickable citations into the exact video moment or PDF page, and no output ever makes a legal conclusion. The distinction matters practically: a report-vs-bodycam inconsistency is only useful if you can pull up the precise timestamp and quote both sides verbatim.

So read the $0.11–$0.50 zone as a floor, not a finish line. The pricing is here. The defensibility standard — citations, labeling, human sign-off — is what turns cheap AI review into review you can actually stand behind in court.

What Predictable Defense-Side Pricing Looks Like

Everything above this section describes pricing you have to call a sales rep to find out. The alternative is the opposite: a published price page, one number per plan, and a hard ceiling on what a bad discovery month can cost you.

Evidence Copilot, which builds review workspaces for criminal-defense teams, publishes three tiers. Solo runs $39/user/month with 15 media-processing hours included. Firm is $99/user/month with 60 hours and a priority queue. Public-defender offices pay $750/attorney/year with 100 hours. Every plan includes the full workspace — there are no feature tiers, so nobody gets a watered-down version of the product at the entry price.

The overage rule is what makes the math predictable. Processing hours are metered, but overage is hard-capped at 3x the included hours — so when the DA drops 200 hours of bodycam and jail calls the week before a preliminary hearing, your worst-case bill for that month is fixed in advance. Runaway intake cannot overbill you.

Put those numbers against the broader market. Software Advice's advisor calls put typical eDiscovery quotes at $100–$250 per user per month, with a median near $225 — Evidence Copilot's Firm tier sits below even the low end of that range. And the PD tier matters most for offices buying per seat: at $750/attorney/year, it undercuts JusticeText's roughly $1,200/attorney/year pricing by about 38%, while adding OCR'd documents, redaction, and cited AI review rather than transcription alone.

What you get at each tier:

• Solo — $39/user/month, 15 processing hours, full workspace, for solo practitioners handling one case at a time.
• Firm — $99/user/month, 60 hours plus priority queue, for firms running several active matters.
• PD Office — $750/attorney/year, 100 hours per attorney, priced for public-defender budgets.
• All tiers — overage metered but capped at 3x included hours, so a discovery dump has a known ceiling.

This matters because the industry's own surveys keep flagging transparency as the failure point. Only 40% of Fortune 1000 inside counsel using cost-cutting tactics could actually measure their savings, and many of those calculations were, per FTI, "only vague estimates" (FTI Technology). A published price with a capped ceiling is the simplest fix for that problem: you know the number before you upload the first file.

One honest caveat: the benchmarks in this article come from the civil eDiscovery market. Defense-side media review — bodycam, interrogation footage, 911 and jail calls — has different cost drivers, and there's no independent survey data covering it yet. Published, capped pricing like Evidence Copilot's is a reasonable starting point for budgeting it, but the numbers above are the company's own, not third-party research.

If you want to see the pricing applied to a real case load, you can book a 20-minute walkthrough at evidencecopilot.com/book, or start on the Solo plan at evidencecopilot.com/signup.

Budget Your Next Discovery Dump: A Practical Checklist

Most discovery budgets blow up not because of the software line item, but because nobody counted the actual work before signing a contract. The fix is unglamorous: estimate your inputs, interrogate the vendor's pricing model, and build in a reserve before the intake email arrives.

Step 1: Count your inputs. Volume is the single biggest cost driver, and custodian count drives volume — so start with a rough inventory. Tally three numbers: media hours (bodycam, interrogation footage, jail calls, 911 audio), file count, and page count for PDFs and scanned reports. Simple files like Word documents process cheaper than complex ones, so note which formats dominate your dump.

Step 2: Convert inputs into review hours. The math from ACEDS is sobering: 100,000 documents at 500 documents per day means 2,000 hours for a single reviewer — and at $100/hour, that's $200,000 before you've written a single note. Review is "the most expensive phase of an e-discovery project because of the human element and the time involved," and it accounts for over 80% of total litigation spend, roughly $42 billion per year according to figures attributed to the American Bar Association. Adding reviewers speeds the work but doesn't necessarily cut cost, since the total review time still has to be spent.

Step 3: Ask the vendor these questions before signing. Pricing models are fragmenting — EDRM's Winter 2026 pricing survey found alternative (non-per-GB) models already at 22.6% for completed processing, with GenAI-assisted review priced experimentally at $0.11–$0.50 per document. That means the quote you get depends entirely on which model the vendor prefers, and the wrong combination can quietly double your bill:

• Is there a per-GB fee for processing or hosting, and what happens when I re-upload corrected files?
• Is user licensing separate — and is there an overage cap, or can a heavy month of intake generate an uncapped bill?
• What do AI features cost, and does every AI answer cite the exact source it came from?
• Who pays when the vendor's transcription misses legal terms and someone has to fix it by hand?

That last point matters because licensing fragmentation is a documented trap: one EDRM analysis warned that a provider charging $5/GB with $150/user monthly access fees can cost more than one charging $15/GB with unlimited users. Evidence Copilot publishes its pricing instead of hiding it behind a sales call — Solo at $39/user/mo with 15 media-processing hours, Firm at $99 with 60 hours, PD Office at $750/attorney/yr — with overage metered but hard-capped at 3x included hours, so a runaway intake month can't turn into an uncapped invoice.

Step 4: Budget proportionately and hold a reserve. ACEDS president Mike Quartararo frames cost management as proportionality management — the budget should match the case's stakes, built bottom-up from a work breakdown, with a 10% reserve for the "known unknowns" every criminal case produces.

If you want to see how this math works against your own intake, you can book a 20-minute walkthrough at evidencecopilot.com/book, or skip the call entirely and start on Solo at evidencecopilot.com/signup.