eDiscovery Buyers Report 2026
Security and CISO governance, AI access, cost and data sovereignty shape where eDiscovery buyers deploy, and 48% expect a hybrid model within 24 months.
In making deployment decisions, legal teams weigh regulatory and data sovereignty
requirements (for example, the EU GDPR’s restrictions on cross-border data transfers), cost, and security to determine the option that best serves their needs.
We asked survey participants to rate the importance of nine deployment factors on a five-point scale. Across all nine factors, at least three quarters of respondents rated each as somewhat important (4) or critically important (5). This at once indicates that, in some cases, considerations tie directly to non-negotiable operational requirements — for instance, around security and where data resides — and that, in almost all others, “softer” criteria, like cost predictability and access to AI, rise to the level of hard-and-fast requirements. The fact that buyers attribute equal importance to a broad range of considerations indicates that organizations take a multidimensional approach to deployment decisions that extend beyond traditional regulatory, security, and cross-border factors.
To see how those decision-making factors rank against one another, we asked participants to select their top two criteria.
35% of buyers rank cybersecurity and CISO governance policies in their top two criteria, followed by AI access and flexibility at 26%.
Read in isolation, this finding understates AI’s influence on deployment decisions.
As organizations pursue aggressive AI adoption, AI has become an underlying driver across several of the top-ranked factors, including cost predictability (threatened by AI-related data growth), cybersecurity (protecting sensitive data from AI training), and infrastructure control (determining which AI models teams can run). When aggregated, AI emerges as the single largest driver of deployment decisions.
Buyers generally do not accept that one deployment model — to simplify it, public vs. private cloud — can serve every matter, and they attribute the narrowing of their options to the incumbent vendor’s commercial strategy rather than their own needs.
68% agree their primary vendor is steering them toward a deployment model that suits the vendor’s commercial model over their own
48% expect to run a hybrid deployment approach within 24 months
No single deployment model commands a majority, reflecting that buyers want infrastructure architected for flexibility, not for one destination.
Respondents also state that private deployment models are best suited to that flexibility. And despite consolidation across the current vendor regime, 92% of respondents expect the pool of credible options to grow over the next five years. Nine in 10 say they need it to.
Chapter 4
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All the data from 200 senior buyers on AI adoption, private deployment, cost and portability, plus the ACEDS industry pulse survey.