October 27, 2026
Triple, triple, double, double. Investors say it about revenue. It is also true of the records a company makes on the way, and in a dispute every one of them has to be found and reviewed.
Every new hire, investor and partner adds email threads, chat channels, shared drives and board decks. And much of what used to be said out loud is now written down too. AI note-takers sit in meetings, and dictation tools turn spoken thoughts into text. A business that scaled in two years can carry the paper trail of one that took ten.
Now picture one of those aging agreements ending up in court. Before anyone argues about what the words meant, the lawyers have to agree on whose records matter, which search terms to run and which dates to cover. Then someone has to collect and review what comes back, including texts, meeting transcripts and public posts about the promise itself. That is discovery, and it is rarely the cheap part.
A RAND study found that reviewing documents made up about 73 percent of what companies spent on electronic discovery. That was 2012. ComplexDiscovery’s market model puts review at 62 percent today, and the dollars spent on it are still rising, because the data they have to cover grows about 35 percent a year.
Some will say AI will automate discovery. It is making discovery better, not smaller. The tools get faster, but the data grows faster. Every document the search returns still has to be checked for the issues in the case, including privilege. And the new tools come with their own price.
Mediation is one way to talk about what each side needs now, without first working through what the records can prove.
The words in an agreement stay the same. The records around it keep growing.
Sources
RAND Corporation, “Where the Money Goes: Understanding Litigant Expenditures for Producing Electronic Discovery,” Nicholas M. Pace and Laura Zakaras, 2012. rand.org
ComplexDiscovery OÜ, “2025 to 2030 eDiscovery Market Size Mashup,” Rob Robinson, republished by EDRM, July 2026. edrm.net
Ariadne Latorre is a Florida Supreme Court certified mediator and a software engineer. She mediates business and commercial, insurance and risk allocation, LegalTech and information governance, HOA and community, and court-ordered matters, in English and Spanish, in Miami and virtually worldwide.