Part I: Why Litigation Complexity Necessitates a Smarter Approach to eDiscovery

Litigation has always been a challenge for corporations. But in today’s climate, it’s become more complex (and more costly) than ever. A combination of shifting regulations, procedural dynamics, and a surge in digital communications has created a perfect storm that corporate legal departments must now navigate.

At the heart of this storm lies eDiscovery, which now accounts for as much as 80% of litigation costs1, making it one of the most critical (and risky) phases in the litigation lifecycle. Small missteps early can lead to huge downstream consequences. Yet many organizations still rely on outdated, reactive workflows that foment complexity, compromise case strategy, and inflate budgets.

In this two-part series, we’ll examine how modern litigation has changed, and why a smarter, more targeted discovery approach isn’t optional — it’s mission-critical for legal teams that want to stay ahead.

The Rising Complexity of Modern Litigation

Multiple forces are converging to make litigation more burdensome, unpredictable, and resource-intensive than ever before.

  • Regulatory volatility. Shifting political environments have triggered increased and often unpredictable scrutiny, increasing the volume and complexity of compliance-related matters. Legal teams must keep up with evolving requirements that vary by jurisdiction and administration.
  • Aggressive litigation tactics. “Nuclear verdicts” and settlement dynamics have made pre-trial strategy more critical, but reaching settlements more difficult. According to the Norton Rose Fulbright 2025 Litigation Trends Report, plaintiffs are getting more aggressive with high-dollar demands, with minimal upfront disclosure. These hardline tactics raise the pressure on defense teams to negotiate without full visibility into the facts.
  • The weaponization of eDiscovery. What once served as a neutral fact-finding phase is now often used as a tactical weapon, driving up costs and delays to force favorable settlements or overwhelm opponents. Read more in Prism Litigation Technology’s two-part blog on the Weaponization of eDiscovery.
  • The digital data deluge. The explosion in data types and volume has created a needle-in-a-haystack problem. Communications are scattered across email, chat apps (e.g., Slack, Teams), mobile devices, cloud repositories, and more. Legal teams must search through overwhelming amounts of noise to find what matters.
  • Generative AI. New AI tools introduce both opportunity and risk — accelerating some tasks, while exposing legal teams to new questions around defensibility and data integrity.

In this high-complexity environment, the margin for error is shrinking. Legal teams must adapt to move beyond reactive tactics and adopt more intentional, insight-driven discovery strategies.

The Cost Pressure is Real (and Getting Worse)

Corporate legal departments are under relentless pressure to do more with less, juggling rising complexity and risk with ever-tightening budgets. But the cost curve is bending in the wrong direction:

  • Legal spend is climbing fast. For large enterprises ($1B+ in revenue), average legal spend jumped from $3.9 billion in 2023 to $4.3 billion in 2024 (10.2% in just one year), according to Norton Rose Fulbright.
  • Law firm rates continue to rise. Outside counsel fees continue to surge, driving up litigation costs across the board. (Read more in this recent CCBJ blog on rate hikes.)
  • Litigation budgets are expanding to compensate. According to BTI Consulting Group, 57% of corporate clients are increasing their litigation budgets in 2025, more than at any point in the last eight years. Over two-thirds are increasing spend by 10% or more.
  • New case types bring new complications. From regulatory investigations and commercial disputes to cybersecurity, ESG, financial, and class actions, organizations face a broader and more technical spectrum of litigation.

Simply put, litigation is no longer a predictable line item; it’s a volatile, escalating expense. This makes efficient and smarter eDiscovery a strategic imperative.

Where Discovery Goes Off the Rails

Despite this imperative, many legal departments remain stuck in outdated workflows that undercut efficiency and drive up costs. Here are some of the most common pitfalls:

Internal Resources Stretched Too Thin

Even when budgets increase, the money often flows to outside counsel and increasing caseloads, not to in-house resources. As a result, internal teams are left overwhelmed, lacking the time and bandwidth to evaluate and adopt better tools and smarter processes. The result? Status quo prevails, even when it is far outdated and inefficient.

Overcollection Drains Time and Budget

Too often, legal teams default to collecting far too much data, which is often duplicative or irrelevant. Why?

  • Attorneys are overcautious, due to fear of missing relevant information.
  • As a whole, the legal industry is slow to fully embrace and implement advanced tools that support targeted, relevance-based collections.
  • Legal teams may not have effectual workflows in place for the crucial first 100 days of a matter to hone collection decisions.

Limited Visibility into Outside Counsel

Without transparency into what outside counsel are doing (and why), legal departments struggle to manage spend or steer strategy. This often erodes trust and makes downstream course correction difficult.

Decentralized Scoping Process Chaos

Custodian and data source information is often tracked in traveling spreadsheets, scattered emails, buried in meeting notes, or put into filed memos. This is unsustainable. It prevents real-time collaboration, obscures decisions, and makes actionable analysis almost impossible. To make matters worse, early case decisions often go undocumented, are inconsistent, or reactive, leading to inefficiencies and/or costly missteps that can manifest down the line.

Insufficient Analytics to Drive Strategy

Most legal teams don’t have dashboards or real-time metrics and reports to support data-driven decision-making. This means early strategic opportunities, like negotiating a narrower scope or early settlement evaluation, are missed. Better insights can inform discovery strategy early, before costs mount and leverage is lost.

Legal Holds are Too Broad (and stick around too long)

Overly cautious holds may seem safe, but they expose the organization to long-term risk. Without a strong protocol to adjust holds mid-matter and release them when the matter concludes, data remains in limbo (and fair game in future litigation), dramatically increasing exposure and cost.

The Bottom Line: Complexity, Not Just Cost, Demands a Rethink

At its core, the modern litigation challenge is not just about volume or cost — it’s about complexity. Legal departments aren’t just drowning in data; they’re navigating a volatile mix of shifting regulations, evolving case dynamics, and fragmented internal processes that make smart decision-making harder at every turn.

Too often, discovery is overblown not because teams are unaware of better methods, but because their systems and structures make it difficult to implement them. Decentralized scoping, delayed visibility, and reactive workflows allow complexity to compound, turning what should be strategic questions into tactical fire drills.

Worse still, many teams delay critical strategic analysis until after collection and review are well underway, and when costs are already locked in.

What’s needed is not just more control, but cohesion:

  • Processes that bring clarity to ambiguity
  • Technology that amplifies judgment, not just speed
  • Early insights that shape strategy, not trail behind it
  • Centralized documentation that supports distributed execution

Smarter workflows implemented at the outset of a matter can do more than reduce cost; they equip legal teams to navigate these pressures proactively. With the right strategic foundation, legal departments can respond to regulatory shifts with more agility, defuse aggressive discovery tactics, focus review despite data sprawl, and apply AI thoughtfully rather than fearfully.

Coming in Part II: We’ll explore how forward-thinking legal teams are transforming discovery from a pain point into a strategic advantage by embracing smarter workflows, targeted processes, and modern technology.

1Ediscovery Costs in 2025, Everlaw.