At the start of the #Legalweek25 session "The Top Litigation Costs in 2025 and How to Control Them," moderator and chief customer officer of DISCO Melanie Antoon took an informal poll of the audience, asking which areas presented the biggest cost challenge for their legal departments. Among such choices as budget predictability, e-discovery infrastructure and deposition costs, the clear winner was legal services such as attorney fees and document review. The panel, which included firm attorneys and a senior counsel for Peloton, could certainly relate. In the wide-ranging conversation about cost containment that followed, a few themes emerged:
🟦 This is not an easy task. "When you are first taking on a case and understanding the scope of a case, it's really hard to predict where you may end up several years down the line," said Jessica Tseng Hasen, senior counsel and head of e-discovery practice at Perkins Coie. "It's very hard to know what you don't know, especially if you're working with a client for the first time as outside counsel. It takes a little bit of time to figure out the client's system, their processes, what their appetite for risk is. And all of those are factors that weigh into how you budget."
🟦 It's important to know when to get off the bus. "I find myself talking about the lifecycle of litigation as getting on a bus," said Michelle Anderson of Fisher Phillips. "So we don't know at what point we're going to get on the bus. I do labor and employment law, and so with employment law, sometimes you're getting on the bus at an administrative phase. In the administrative phase there might be an opportunity to get off the bus or it might be during mediation ... So a lot of times we're talking about being on the bus and how long do we want to be on the bus versus your ability to defend or prosecute the case."
🟦 Data is key. "The easy things to price out are the discovery costs," said Christian Hakim of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP. "You can do some good diligence on the front end to determine your sizes, your number of custodians, your sources, and what the cost is going to be and how it's going to play out this time. I think the key part in this is having meaningful data to look back on, and that is something we work with all of our clients, our internal partners to makes sure that we're tracking the right metrics to eventually be able to look at them after the fact."
🟦 Reliable partners are even more essential. "One of the things I think is really key for any in-house department," asserted Laura K., senior counsel at Peloton Interactive, "is to find true partners that are invested in the company's success and who learn and understand not only what the company does but also what technology it has, really understands where the documents are ahead of time ... partners who not only talk the talk but walk the walk."
In the video, Kessler talks about her preferences for hiring outside counsel while considering cost.
