Extract from Reveal’s article, “What Decision-Makers Look for When Buying an eDiscovery Platform.”
Every eDiscovery RFP now asks two questions that used to be separate line items and have become one and the same: where does the data live, and whose AI model is touching it? The market’s largest incumbent has set a firm sunset date for its long-standing on-premises platform, forcing a wave of buyers to re-platform on someone else’s timeline. At the same time, AI has moved from pilot budget to operational line item, and with it comes a new set of questions about model access, data residency and cost predictability. Reveal’s own research puts a number on the shift: 91% of eDiscovery buyers report that their share of matters requiring private or on-premises deployment has grown over the past 24 months, according to the 2026 eDiscovery Buyers Report, a survey of 200 senior legal technology decision-makers.
eDiscovery Buyers, Defined
eDiscovery buyers are the legal, IT, compliance, and security decision-makers evaluating eDiscovery platforms not solely for review functionality but for deployment control, AI model independence, and predictable total cost of ownership. As data volumes and AI-driven processing costs climb, this buying decision increasingly determines how much control an organization retains over its own evidence.
