The first number that matters is $45,000 to $80,000. That's what a standard first-pass review costs for a 50,000-document collection, assuming conventional attorney review without technology-assisted review to reduce the review population. The range is wide because it depends on document complexity, staffing model, matter urgency, and how much of the work is handled by litigation support firm staff versus outside counsel. But $60,000 as a midpoint isn't far off for most commercial litigation matters in major markets.
Where that number comes from, and where it goes when you change the inputs, is what this article is about.
The Attorney Hours Calculation
First-pass review at 50,000 documents typically runs 600 to 800 attorney hours. That's based on a real-world average review rate of roughly 60 to 80 documents per hour for contract reviewers doing first-pass coding, and assumes a mixed collection of emails, attachments, and native files. Highly formatted documents slow reviewers down. Short email chains speed them up. Eight hundred hours is on the high end for complex collections; 600 is realistic for relatively clean document sets.
Here's the thing about attorney hours: the billing rate multiplier is where litigation support firms and law firms diverge sharply. Contract attorney review rates at litigation support firms typically run $65 to $95 per hour, depending on market and matter complexity. The same review at a law firm's standard associate rates would be $200 to $350 per hour for the same coding decisions. This is why clients route first-pass review to litigation support firms and why the economics of that choice are significant at scale.
| Staffing Model | Hours (50K docs) | Blended Rate | Estimated Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Law firm associates | 600-800 | $225-$300/hr | $135,000-$240,000 |
| Litigation support firm (contract attorneys) | 600-800 | $75-$95/hr | $45,000-$76,000 |
| Litigation support + TAR (30-40% depth) | 180-320 | $75-$95/hr | $13,500-$30,400 |
Those numbers represent first-pass review only. They don't include processing, hosting, QC, or production. But they show why the staffing model choice is one of the highest-impact decisions in discovery budget management.
QC Reclassification: The Hidden Cost Multiplier
First-pass review costs are only part of the picture. Quality control reclassification rates, the percentage of first-pass coding decisions that get overturned during QC, determine how much review you're actually paying for twice.
Without TAR, reclassification rates of 15 to 25 percent are common on commercial litigation matters. Honestly, that's not a quality failure. It's a feature of how first-pass review works. Reviewers are coding at speed with incomplete context. QC catches the edge cases. But at 20 percent reclassification across 50,000 documents, you're re-reviewing 10,000 documents. Add QC attorney time on top of first-pass hours and the total review effort grows accordingly.
TAR changes this in two ways. First, it reduces the review population, so there are fewer documents to reclassify in the first place. Second, it surfaces the most confidently-coded documents for QC, reducing the overall reclassification rate. In our tracking, TAR-assisted reviews show QC reclassification rates of 8 to 14 percent, down from the 15 to 25 percent baseline. That's meaningful.
What TAR Does to the Cost Structure
TAR's primary economic effect is reducing review depth. Instead of reviewing 100 percent of the processed collection, a well-calibrated TAR workflow allows you to achieve 90 percent recall by reviewing 30 to 40 percent of documents. For a 50,000-document collection, that means reviewing 15,000 to 20,000 documents instead of 50,000.
Fact: at 30 percent review depth, total first-pass hours drop from 600-800 to roughly 180-240. At 40 percent, it's 240-320. At litigation support firm rates, that's a cost reduction from the $45,000-$80,000 baseline to $13,500-$30,400. A 55 to 70 percent cost reduction on first-pass review. On a single matter.
The practical barrier is front-end investment. TAR requires training time, initial review of seed documents to calibrate the model, and QC validation of the non-review population. We've seen that add-on cost run $5,000 to $12,000 depending on platform, collection characteristics, and protocol documentation requirements. On a small collection, TAR may not be cost-justified. On anything over 30,000 documents, the math typically favors TAR clearly.
Practical note: the TAR break-even point varies by collection. A rough rule of thumb is that TAR becomes cost-positive at approximately 25,000 documents, assuming a litigation support firm staffing model. Below that threshold, the training overhead can equal or exceed the review savings.
Per-Document Cost Benchmarks
Some clients and matter budgets are organized around per-document costs rather than total project costs. The benchmarks differ by workflow:
- Conventional first-pass review: $0.90 to $1.60 per document at litigation support firm rates, based on the hours and rates cited above
- TAR-assisted review (30-40% depth): $0.27 to $0.61 per document reviewed, though the total per-document cost including non-review population disposition runs $0.35 to $0.75 per total document in the collection
- Law firm rates (conventional): $2.70 to $4.80 per document, explaining why first-pass review at law firms is increasingly rare for high-volume matters
These are market benchmarks, not fixed prices. Complex matters with multilingual documents, unusual file types, or tight turnaround requirements command premiums. Simple matters with clean email collections may come in below the floor.
Litigation Support Firm vs. Law Firm Economics: Where the Lines Actually Are
The cost differential between litigation support firms and law firms for document review isn't controversial. Everyone acknowledges it. What's less clearly understood is where the split in actual work happens in practice.
In our experience, the model that produces the best economics for clients is: litigation support firm handles first-pass review and TAR workflow management; supervising attorneys at the law firm handle QC decisions on the review population above a materiality threshold; law firm associates handle only the highest-stakes subset, documents tagged hot or potentially dispositive.
This three-tier model captures the cost advantages of litigation support firm staffing for high-volume work while keeping attorney judgment where it adds most value: on the documents that actually matter to the case theory. The review cost allocation ends up looking roughly like 70 percent litigation support firm rates, 20 percent mid-level associate rates, 10 percent partner or senior associate rates.
For a 50,000-document matter, that model typically lands total review costs in the $30,000 to $55,000 range, including QC, depending on collection characteristics and TAR eligibility. Still a meaningful reduction from both the conventional litigation support firm baseline and the law firm baseline.
Using These Benchmarks for Matter Budgets
The benchmarks above are starting points, not fixed budgets. Matter-specific factors that push costs higher include: late collection resulting in compressed review timelines (premium staffing rates run 15 to 30 percent above standard), highly technical document content requiring specialized reviewer knowledge, and contested TAR protocols requiring additional documentation and possible court-ordered validation.
Factors that push costs below benchmark include early custodian stratification (reducing review population by redirecting near-zero custodians to privilege-only review), clean collections with low email thread duplication, and matters where opposing parties have agreed to TAR protocols in advance through the Rule 26(f) conference, reducing the QC documentation burden.
The most reliable way to build an accurate matter budget is to baseline it on collection size, estimate review depth with and without TAR, apply your actual staffing rates, and add 20 percent for QC and project management overhead. That approach produces estimates that hold within 15 to 20 percent of actual costs in most matters we've tracked. Good enough to give clients realistic expectations and defensible budget numbers before the matter is fully scoped.
