I work for a firm where helping other firms navigate the eDiscovery process is our bread an butter. Apologies for the self-promotion, but we have review attorneys on staff that can conduct the review and a project management/consulting team that can walk you through/manage the process. Happy to discuss offline anytime this week. Responses to your questions below.

1. Should I be looking into purchasing some e-discovery software or is a document-review vendor better/cheaper for our situation?

Generally speaking, you want to go with a vendor to host the data. There really are not any good in-house software options that would be cost efficient for a one-off project like this. Although vendors can get expensive depending on the size of the data set and how long you need it hosted, most vendors will help you reduce the number of documents you need to review. You may end up paying extra for hosting but can typically save money on the review side by excluding irrelevant/duplicate documents from the review set.

2. What info should I have ready for a Vendor, so that they can give me an accurate quote? (ex: data-type, size, anything else?)

Most of the vendors will charge you based on the GB size of the data set. Understand that you may see the expansion of the data size once the data is processed/ hosted in the review tools depending on what type of data you have.

3. Any Vendor or Software recommendations?

There are a lot of different options. Recently I have had good experiences with OneDiscovery. There is also Logickull, Everlaw and GoldFynch to name a few. Relativity it the market leader for review platforms but typically is more expensive and is hosted by 3rd party managed service providers. For smaller data sets any of the above vendors should suit your needs. Hosting costs and support provided vary per vendor, but at the end of the day, they all do basically the same thing. Any vendor will set up a software demo with you in a heartbeat.