How to Value a Litigation Support Business in 2026

Litigation support is the highest-multiple business in the legal services stack, and it's not close. Court reporting trades at 3-5x EBITDA. Deposition services trades at 3-5x. Litigation support — meaning e-discovery, document review, forensic collection, managed review, and the tech-enabled services that surround complex litigation — trades at 5-9x EBITDA, with genuine platform acquisitions pushing above 10x. The reason is simple: it's a technology business wearing a legal services uniform, and technology businesses trade on technology multiples.

I've advised on both sides of litigation support deals and the valuation math looks more like a SaaS acquisition than a services business acquisition. Revenue per engagement is high, gross margins on hosted data are excellent, BigLaw clients pay promptly, and the switching costs once a matter is loaded into a review platform are enormous. All of that flows directly into EBITDA multiples.

The Range: 5-9x EBITDA (and Why)

A well-run litigation support firm with $5M EBITDA trades in the $25-45M range. A tech-enabled firm with proprietary software, recurring hosting revenue, and AmLaw 100 clients might trade higher. The variables that move a deal from 5x to 9x are specific and measurable:

• Recurring hosting revenue: Firms where 40%+ of revenue is monthly hosted-data fees on Relativity, Reveal, Everlaw, or proprietary platforms get the highest multiples. It's essentially SaaS revenue with a services wrapper.
• Proprietary technology: Owning a review tool, an analytics layer, or an AI-assisted coding engine adds 1-2x to the multiple because it's defensible IP.
• BigLaw concentration: AmLaw 100 and AmLaw 200 clients generate higher per-matter revenue and are sticky because the firms don't want to re-train on new vendors.
• Managed review capability: Running document review with contract attorneys is high-margin and creates a repeatable service line that buyers love.

A firm that hits all four of those markers can credibly ask for 8-9x EBITDA from a strategic buyer. A firm that's essentially a reseller of Relativity hosting with a handful of mid-market law firm clients is closer to 5-6x. The gap is 3-4x of EBITDA, which on a $3M EBITDA business is $9-12M of enterprise value. Understanding where you sit on that continuum is everything.

Why E-Discovery Is a Tech Business

If you strip out the legal veneer, a litigation support firm is doing three things: collecting data from custodians, processing it into a review platform, and supporting attorneys through the review-and-produce workflow. All three steps involve technology margins, not labor margins. Data processing runs 70-80% gross margin. Hosted review platforms run 75-85% gross margin once you're past the platform licensing cost. Forensic collection is the lowest-margin line at 40-50%, but it's the entry point that creates the larger hosted relationship.

When a buyer models your business, they're looking at those gross margins and comparing them to software businesses, not court reporting businesses. That's why the multiples are structurally different. A managed services firm with 45% gross margins trades at 5x EBITDA. An e-discovery firm with 65% gross margins trades at 7x EBITDA on the same revenue. The underlying math justifies the gap.

BigLaw Clients Are the Moat

The reason litigation support firms get premium multiples is that AmLaw 100 clients are sticky in a way that downstream legal services clients aren't. When a BigLaw firm loads a matter onto your Relativity instance, they're not moving it. The cost of re-processing 4 terabytes of data and re-training a review team on a new platform is enormous. As long as you don't drop the ball on service, you keep the matter through its entire lifecycle — often 2-4 years.

Multiply that across 20-30 active BigLaw matters and you have a recurring revenue stream that looks and feels like a subscription business. Buyers pay SaaS-adjacent multiples because the revenue visibility is SaaS-adjacent. This is the rare legal services context where EBITDA multiples understate value — strategic buyers increasingly model these deals on revenue multiples because hosted revenue is that predictable.

The diligence question is how many of your top 20 matters are more than 12 months old and still billing monthly hosting fees. If the answer is 15+, you have real recurring revenue. If the answer is under 10, you're more project-based than subscription and the multiple compresses.

The Active Acquirers

The litigation support M&A landscape has been consolidating aggressively for a decade and the buyer pool is deep. KLDiscovery (formerly Kroll), Consilio, Epiq Systems (owned by OMERS Private Equity), DISCO, Lighthouse, Cimplifi, and Cobra Legal Solutions are all active strategic buyers. On the private equity side, Leeds Equity, Aquiline, and multiple other PE firms have built or are building legal-tech platforms that acquire litigation support firms as tuck-ins.

Strategic premiums are real in this space. When Consilio acquired Advanced Discovery, when Epiq rolled up multiple e-discovery firms, and when DISCO went public in 2021, the multiples being paid for quality platforms regularly touched 12-15x EBITDA. Those deals set the ceiling for what top-tier litigation support firms can command in a competitive process. A $40M revenue firm with proprietary technology and a AmLaw 50 book of business can genuinely expect multiple bidders at 9-12x EBITDA if the business is run properly.

What Buyers Diligence

• Hosted data under management: Total GB under management and monthly hosting revenue per GB. The product of those numbers is your recurring revenue run-rate.
• Matter retention: What percentage of matters active 24 months ago are still active today, and what revenue do they generate.
• Platform certifications: Relativity Certified Administrator headcount, Reveal certifications, Everlaw partner status. These signal technical depth.
• Managed review margins: Contract attorney review running at 30%+ gross margin indicates operational sophistication. Under 20% suggests poor utilization.
• AI and analytics capabilities: Predictive coding, TAR 2.0 workflows, and increasingly genAI-assisted review. Firms without an AI story get discounted because buyers assume the margin curve is flattening.
• Data security and certifications: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and FedRAMP if applicable. Lack of certifications is a dealbreaker with BigLaw clients.

What Destroys Value

Thin BigLaw representation. If your client base is mid-market firms and boutique litigation shops, the multiple compresses toward the low end of the range. The buyer pool narrows because national platforms want AmLaw relationships they can leverage.

Heavy reliance on a single platform. Firms that are 95% Relativity reseller are worth less than firms with platform diversity (Relativity, Reveal, Everlaw, proprietary tools). Platform concentration creates vendor risk that buyers price in.

Project-based revenue without hosted tail. If every engagement ends at production and you're not keeping data under management afterward, your revenue is transactional rather than recurring. Same EBITDA, significantly lower multiple. Building the hosted-tail business is the single highest-leverage thing an owner can do in the 24 months before a sale.

Data security gaps. Any material security incident, unresolved audit finding, or missing certification is a potential dealbreaker. BigLaw clients won't stay with a firm that fails their vendor security reviews, and buyers know that. Get your SOC 2 done well before going to market. Sale prep in this space is more technical than in most industries, but the same principles from standard exit preparation still apply on top of the technology work.

Maximizing the Exit

The playbook for maximizing a litigation support exit has three priorities. First, grow hosted revenue as a percentage of total revenue — target 40%+ recurring. This is the single biggest multiple driver. Second, move up-market on client mix. Two or three AmLaw 100 relationships are worth more than twenty mid-market clients at the same aggregate revenue. Third, invest in technology differentiation, whether that's a proprietary workflow, an AI-assisted review layer, or deep platform specialization. Buyers pay for defensible IP.

Done well, a $2M EBITDA litigation support firm can go from a 5x exit ($10M) to an 8x exit ($16M) with 24 months of focused execution. That $6M of incremental value dwarfs almost any other operational improvement an owner could make, and it's the reason I tell litigation support owners to start exit planning earlier than they think they need to.

The Bottom Line

Litigation support is the most valuable vertical in legal services because it sits at the intersection of recurring technology revenue, sticky BigLaw clients, and genuinely defensible operational moats. The firms that understand this and build accordingly trade at 7-9x EBITDA and attract competitive bidding from national platforms. The firms that treat it as a project-based services business trade at 5-6x and get one-bidder exits. The difference between those outcomes is entirely about how the business is positioned and operated in the 24-36 months before going to market — and the financial stakes of getting it right are as high as any services-business exit I see.