A Buyer’s Roadmap for Vendor Demos: 5 Questions to Get the Answers You Need
Stephen Herrera
AI Leader. Dad. eDiscovery Adventurer. Zealous Client Advocate. Hispanic Bar Association Member. People Connector. Denver Legal Professional.
Disclosure - This material is general information for legal operations and does not constitute legal advice.
Hook. If a demo cannot survive a doomsday scenario, it will not survive your next matter.
Reality. Vendor demos sparkle. Real cases do not. They surge in volume, break tidy workflows, and punish weak performance.
Goal. Use the five questions below to turn theater into evidence and take performance to the next level.
(Thank you for reading and sharpening this playbook with me ❤️)
Why Demos Mislead
Polish hides weakness. A perfect path conceals brittle edges.
Performance is not volunteered. Limits stay buried unless you ask.
Security looks like paperwork. A glossy PDF is not a control.
To get past the stage lights, you need questions that force numbers, not adjectives.
A One-Week Reality Check
Picture a typical Monday to Friday. On Monday you inherit 28 custodians and a clean intake plan. By Tuesday the scope doubles because chat archives surface from a forgotten workspace. On Wednesday opposing counsel drops a rolling production with mixed time zones and corrupted PST files. Thursday your reviewers stall because indexing lags behind ingestion and analytics jobs queue up. Friday leadership wants a status readout with time to searchable, burn rate, and exposure on privilege hits. None of this is exotic. It is ordinary turbulence. The platforms that thrive here are the ones that handle messy inputs, show their limits before you hit them, and price fairly when the curveballs arrive. Your demo needs to simulate that week, not a museum tour.
The 5 Questions
1. Pricing Truth: what is included in your pricing, and what is not?
Define boundaries. Ask about user tiers, data in and out, analytics, AI usage, storage classes, archiving, support levels, and surge fees. Request a sample invoice tied to a realistic month.
2. Spike Behavior: how do you handle sudden data volume spikes?
This is the performance make or break. Pin down ingestion throughput, indexing speed, queue prioritization, and the change in cost and latency when intake triples in a week. Ask for time to searchable, time to stable performance, and cost per additional terabyte under load.
3. Voice of Client: what feedback do you hear most, and how do you act on it?
Shift from sales to operations. Request the top three complaints in the last two quarters, what changed, and mean time to resolution. Look for a closed loop, not a promise.
4. Honest Limits: what is the one capability clients ask for that you do not yet offer?
Every product has edges. Surface the gap, the current workaround, any partner dependency, and whether it is on the roadmap with an owner and a date.
5. Decision Tie Breaker: if I compare you with two named competitors, why should I pick you?
Force specific differentiation that holds under stress. Examples include native handling of chat and collaboration exports, custodian elasticity, continuous active learning settings, or policy controls that reduce reviewer touch time.
Why These Questions Matter
They expose the risks that derail timelines and inflate bills.
• Gaps in functionality: Workarounds multiply effort and cost.
• Hidden costs: Egress, AI usage, and surge fees arrive late.
• Performance drags: Slow ingestion and indexing stall review starts.
• Integration delays: Missing connectors and brittle APIs push deadlines.
• Security weakness: Paper controls without monitoring invite incidents.
How to Operationalize the Answers
Standardize the script. Use the same five questions in every demo to compare like for like.
Capture side by side. Build a one-page grid with the vendor’s numbers, caveats, and test conditions. No adjectives.
Verify live. Ask to process a malformed chat export, a corrupt PST, or a mixed language set. Observe failure handling and recovery time.
Contract to the numbers. Put throughput floors, time to searchable, surge policy, and support response times into the order form with credits for misses.
Run a preflight. Before go-live, simulate your heaviest week. Confirm performance and the exact invoice behavior.
Conclusion
Demos are theater. Your matters are not. These five doomsday questions convert performance art into evaluation, so you buy for reality, protect timelines and budget, and raise operational performance on day one.
Data nerd helping others create value and do data better
1moHOW is training, WHY is education. I've been on both the software and services side of the legal tech profession. If your demo doesn't answer the WHY, go talk to clients and prospects to find out what matters to them. If it doesn't add value in improved processes and reduced cost, do it again and involve your Product team. If it also monetizes data volume, go back to the drawing board.
eDiscovery Solutions Manager at Akerman LLP Miami Chapter Director at Women in eDiscovery
1moFor me, I want substance. It's easy to try to be flashy and creative. I want more. In a recent WiE webinar with the DC chapter, a key takeaway was the importance of tools integrating with the tools that we already use. In other words, know your audience. What tools are we already using, and how can your tool complete and enhance our tool stack? Skip the show, prove the know!
LegalTech | LLM Evaluation | Advisor | SE Regional Director for Women in eDiscovery
1moAs a vendor, your job is to make sure clients are comparing apples to apples whether it's pricing, SLAs or edge cases. We practice and practice our demos until they look very slick, which counterintuitively can erode trust when it doesn't adhere to real-world scenarios. Great questions for buyers to ask to get the apples to apples comparison.
AI Leader. Dad. eDiscovery Adventurer. Zealous Client Advocate. Hispanic Bar Association Member. People Connector. Denver Legal Professional.
1moHow do you separate "wheat from chaff" in vendor demos (or give the best picture, vendor friends) Kassi Burns Michael Silvain CAT CASEY Kelly Twigger Andrew Kent 🦡 Chris Colvin Timothy Garner Dave Tiller Karen V. Ashley Papke Jeffery Kruse Nicholas Wittenberg Aaron Patton Stephen Montoya Raymond Rivard and Emma Kelly?